


Words for Calm

by Ember_Keelty



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Abuse, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Inquisitor Backstory, Mage Rebellion, Mages and Templars, Ostwick Circle, Torture, achronological storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-01
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-02-08 23:26:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 15
Words: 56,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12875313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ember_Keelty/pseuds/Ember_Keelty
Summary: You’re not an unfamiliar sight. Mages from noble families are given more leeway. Besides, Ostwick’s Circle had a reputation for being rather sedate.Evelyn Trevelyan knows that her life in the Circle hasn't been all that bad, considering. But as the rebellion spreads throughout Thedas, everything begins to fall apart.





	1. Home Again

Ostwick Circle was a fortress in the mountains outside the city proper, though not too terribly far away. The fortress's only outward facing windows were in the Templar quarters, so Ev herself never saw the city from inside of it, but she knew that it was, in principle, possible to do so. The mountain roads were winding and rocky, though, and the rain pouring down on them today made the stone slippery and the dirt tacky, so she suspected that this carriage ride would be a long one, in duration if not in distance.

As a child, Ev had loved being out in the rain. Her first couple years in the Circle, she had frustrated the Templars by slipping out to the courtyard during storms and dismayed the Enchanters by tracking muddy water onto the floors when they dragged her back in. Now, though, she found herself glad for the covered carriage keeping her dry. The idea of being stuck in damp, clinging robes for hours on the road made her shudder.

"You doing all right over there, Ev?" Pauline sat on the opposite bench, a fond smile on her face as she watched Ev watch the world go by through the carriage window. She had traded in her usual heavy plate for a jerkin and breeches, though she still wore her sword at her side. This was the first time since before the Circle that Ev had seen her without her armor, and it was even more surreal of a sight than the open road and unobstructed horizon.

"Yes," said Ev. "I'm just... remembering."

"Remembering what?" Pauline coaxed her. "This is going to be a really boring trip if you keep so quiet all through it."

"Everything. There's so much. A whole world."

"You'll be okay. I'm here to guide you through it, cuz."

Ev laughed in amazement. That one word pushed this whole situation past surreal and into outright dreamlike. She knew that it wasn't a dream, but she ran through the list anyway, just to stay in the habit: close your eyes and open them, scan the sky for anything that shouldn't be there, ask yourself how you got here.

The world went dark and then came back into view just like it was supposed to when she was seeing it with her eyes and not her mind. There were no boulders or Black Cities floating among the storm clouds. She was in a carriage and not in the Circle because a few days ago she had passed her Harrowing — and yes, she had vivid memories of exactly how _that_ went, and they were nothing like the reassuring ideal that a demon would have impressed on her — and as soon as she'd recovered from the lyrium imbalance, Pauline had arranged a trip home for her to see her parents. She would have to return to the Circle afterward, because this wasn't a dream where everything was perfect, but her family planned to try to find a court placement for her as an arcane advisor, and this visit marked the first step in that process.

"I appreciate it, _cuz_ ," Ev answered, and managed to smile back.

Ev had several relatives who were Templars, but Pauline — her second cousin on her father's side — was the only woman. When Ev was a small child, Pauline had been a recent initiate to the Order, and Ev had admired and adored her. She'd taken every family gathering they were both present for as an opportunity to attach herself to her cousin's hip and ask endless questions about swords and armor and fighting. After all, Ev was the youngest of her siblings, just as Pauline was the youngest of hers, and if Pauline could be a Templar instead of a boring Chantry sister, that meant that Ev could do the same.

Or it _would_ have meant that, anyway, if not for the obvious problem.

Ev had been out in the rain when that first surfaced, too. It had been a thunderstorm, the kind where lightning jumped frenetically between the clouds without ever striking down, making the whole world flicker like a sputtering candle. She was eight years old and had never seen a storm like that before. The play of light mesmerized her, but its refusal to behave like the lightning she was used to itched at her mind. A childish impulse struck her, then, and she held up her hand and called that lightning down to her.

Even as young and silly as she'd been at the time, she had been startled into screaming when it actually _worked_. As the lightning danced harmlessly over skin — the same way it had danced between the clouds above, but close enough now to see in detail — the screams turned to giddy laughter halfway out of her throat. She'd been so enthralled that she'd barely noticed at the time how her sister, who'd been watching over her that afternoon, stared at her in horror.

Leona told their parents later that Ev had used magic. Ev had been confused by that, because only mages used magic, and mages were the monsters that people like Pauline fought. _A mage is a fire made flesh and a demon asleep_ , the saying went, and Ev knew for a fact that she wasn't either of those things, because fire didn't have feelings and demons only had bad ones, like rage and despair. Ev was a normal girl who loved her family and wanted to grow up to fight evil and help people.

"I'm not a mage!" she had shouted at her sister — and when Leona had contradicted her, she'd kept shouting, getting angrier and angrier until sparks flew from her hands.

Pauline had been the one to help her then, too. She'd explained that mages weren't literally demons, just people who tended to attract them, and that most of her job as a Templar wasn't about fighting abominations so much as ensuring that they never came to exist in the first place. She'd taken Ev to the Circle herself, the same one she was stationed at — which wouldn't normally have been allowed, but the Trevelyans were a special case. Ev had relatives working in most of the Circles throughout Thedas, and the Chantry leadership was on good enough terms with her parents to honor their request that she be kept close enough for easy correspondence.

She really was incredibly lucky. How many other mages would have been given an opportunity to visit home so soon after being Harrowed? Not very many at all, Ev thought — and that was _before_ taking into account how her Harrowing had gone.

"You're clamming up again already," Pauline teased her, interrupting her thoughts. "And also frowning. You sure you're okay?"

"Sorry," said Ev. "I just keep thinking about the Harrowing. And Ser Martin. And—" And Belinda, honestly, but Ev knew better than to bring her up now. Pauline meant well, but she could get a bit overprotective sometimes. "And everything."

"Well, the Harrowing is over, and you passed," Pauline reassured her. "You can go ahead and put that from your mind forever now. You've earned it." Ev had some doubts about that, but, given her reasons for those doubts, complaining about them to Pauline of all people would be tactless and ungrateful. "As for Ser Martin..." Pauline paused and took a deep breath in and out, as though she were struggling to maintain her own sense of tact. She clearly didn't think any better of him than Ev did. "For now, at least, he's stuck back at the Circle, and you aren't. Don't let him ruin this for you."

"What is his problem with me anyway?" Ev asked. "I'd never even noticed him before that day after the Harrowing, and then suddenly... that happened. Was it really just about how the test went?"

Normally, she wouldn't pry into Templar affairs so casually, but the atmosphere in the carriage car was relaxed enough that she almost couldn't help but let down her guard a bit. Pauline looked so much like she had back when they were younger and their relationship was less complicated. Even the sound of water battering against the roof felt cozy and unthreatening, like the rain always had been in those early years. It couldn't reach her here.

A lot of things couldn't reach her here.

"It isn't really a problem with you, specifically," Pauline admitted. "He doesn't like any of us. The Trevelyans, I mean. Believe me, he has made that very, very clear. If anything, I think he might actually hate me more than he does you."

"Why is that?"

"Because he's young and zealous and _stupid_!" The sudden rise in Pauline's volume was enough to make Ev flinch. "It's these new recruits, the ones who've been coming in since Kirkwall. They're just as bad as the rebels, if not worse. Actually, you know what? I think they are worse, because they have a responsibility to know better! Stability is our job! It's what they supposedly signed up for, and yet, here they are—!" She cut herself off abruptly, looking sheepish. "Sorry. That's my problem, and I shouldn't be worrying you with it. You really do deserve to take this chance to just... forget about all that, for a while."

"I'll try," Ev promised her. Then she braved a smile, and Pauline smiled back, and the atmosphere of calm returned, however tenuously.

—

Roses bloomed in the garden outside the Trevelyan mansion, their nostalgic scent overpowering even before Ev opened the carriage door and stepped out amid them. The rain had let up by then, but the air was still wet enough to magnify their fragrance. That was a nice thing to be welcomed by, Ev thought. She liked the courtyard garden well enough, but it was all elfroot and embrium and other useful herbs.

Funny, though: she'd remembered rose bushes being taller.

Pauline knocked on the front door. Instead of a manservant, Ev's own mother appeared as it flung open. Ev spotted a bit of grey around her temples and a few shallow lines around the corners of her eyes and mouth, but otherwise she was the same as ever — except, of course, that she also looked shorter than Ev remembered, though now that Ev recalled the obvious reason for that, it was a bit less startling.

"Evelyn?" she asked breathlessly. When Ev nodded, her mother pulled her into an embrace so tight, it was almost uncomfortable. "Look at you! You're all grown up!" Her grip loosened, and she pulled back just enough to look her daughter over. "Oh, but what did you do to your beautiful, long hair?"

"It's easier to take care of this way," Ev told her. "And also less likely to accidentally catch on fire."

Her mother smiled a bit awkwardly at the casually magic-related joke, but at least she was making an effort.

Ev's father came up behind her mother. He didn't say anything at first, and the way that he looked at her, Ev thought that he seemed somehow lost. Her mother moved out of his way so that he could hug her too, but instead he just reached out and patted her on the shoulder. "Hello there, stranger," he quipped to her — and then Ev was the one forcing herself to smile at a joke she didn't entirely find funny.

A third figure — a man whom Ev did not recognize, tall and sporting a thick beard — appeared in the doorway. He leaned his broad back against the wall, crossed his visibly muscular arms over his chest, and watched Ev without approaching her, his eyes coolly curious.

Ev's mother noticed her warily watching him back, and followed her gaze. "Jeffrey!" she reprimanded him. "Don't pretend you're so aloof! It's been twelve long years since you last saw your sister!"

"Jeffrey," Ev repeated in disbelief. "That's Jeffrey?" Her brother was only a year older than her. How could he look so much like an adult? Everything else had gotten smaller, so how could he have gotten so impossibly _big_?

Did Ev look as jarringly different to him? Did she look that way to her parents? If her father saw her as a grown woman he had never met before, maybe that explained why he hesitated to touch her. Maybe it didn't have anything to do with magic at all.

"Yes indeed," said the strange man, his impassive expression breaking into a sardonic grin. His voice was as unrecognizable as the rest of him. "This—" He uncrossed his arms to wave a hand at himself. "—is Jeffrey. And I'm sorry to say that I'm not pretending anything. I really am just a coldhearted bastard."

"You know," said Pauline, "those clouds look ominous. We should go inside before it starts raining again."

"Do you really think it will?" Ev asked nervously. Getting caught in the rain sounded even less pleasant than getting caught in an argument between her mother and brother for which she had no context.

"Hold on just a moment, dears," Ev's mother insisted. Then she pivoted back to face Jeffrey, and her voice shifted from apologetic to stern just as smoothly. "Now is not the time. Come be a part of the family."

Jeffrey shrugged, but otherwise did not budge. "I'm already more a part of the family than she is."

"I think I felt a drop," said Pauline.

"That is _not_ true!" Ev's mother snapped at Jeffrey. Turning back to Ev she repeated, soft and mortified, "That is not true. None of us feel like that. Even Jeffrey doesn't feel like that. He's just being difficult."

"Pauline said she felt a drop," Ev pointed out.

"I haven't felt anything," said her father. "Maybe you were mistaken?" he asked Pauline.

"Or maybe no one should speak for anyone else regarding what they do or don't feel," said Jeffrey.

"I would _really_ rather not get my clothes wet," Ev pleaded.

"So would I," said Pauline. "Come on, cuz." She took hold of Ev's wrist and marched toward the door with enough determination that Ev's parents had no choice but to move out of their way.

"Jeffrey, please, your sister won't be visiting for very long," Ev's mother continued as she and the rest of the family followed them in. "Why can't you just be civil for one day?"

"I've been 'civil' for most of my life," said Jeffrey. "Now I don't have to be, and I must say, I'm quite enjoying that."

Ev felt Pauline's grip on her wrist tighten, and looked up to see her cousin frowning. Belatedly, it occurred to her that Pauline had probably brought up the threat of rain in hopes that relocating to the foyer would throw off this whole conversation, whatever it was even about. Unfortunately, that hadn't quite worked out for her.

"Is Leona here too?" Ev asked, making her own attempt to change the subject. "How is she? I haven't heard anything from her in ages."

That did put a halt to the arguing, as everyone turned to stare at her: her father and Pauline each in some mixture of discomfort and embarrassment, her mother in near-horror, and Jeffrey in sheer, wicked delight.

"You mean you don't know?" Jeffrey asked.

"Don't know what?" Ev felt her stomach jolt. Pauline would have told her if something bad had happened to her sister, wouldn't she have? "Isn't she all right?"

" _She's_ fine," said Pauline, with an emphasis that clearly implied not everything else was.

"She is _not_ fine!" Ev's mother snapped.

"Pauline, did you really have to let this conversation wait until now?" Ev's father asked.

"I thought you would want her to hear it from you," Pauline argued. "I thought she already might have heard it from you. You keep writing her letters. Why couldn't you have written about that?"

"About what?" Ev asked again, trying not to let the probably needless panic creep into her voice. "What happened?"

"Leona ran off with a dwarf from the Merchants' Guild," Jeffrey said. "A _female_ dwarf, at that — which I, personally, would argue is the less concerning alternative, since it means there's no danger of stubby, thickset bastards popping up. But I understand not everyone shares my priorities."

Was that all? Really? Good for Leona, then. The nausea faded, and the tension began to ease out of Ev's muscles. It wasn't that she couldn't understand why something like that would be a disaster from her parents' perspective. It was just that their perspective had become irrevocably foreign to her after years at the Circle redefining the meaning of disaster. "How long ago did this happen?"

"A little over a year now, I think," Pauline answered.

"Which isn't that long at all, really," Ev's mother pointed out. "She could still change her mind. None of us would hesitate for a moment to forgive her if she did."

"I, for one, don't feel like she did anything I _need_ to forgive her for, and I can't imagine why you do," Jeffrey said. Ev had been thinking almost exactly that, and hearing him give voice to her thoughts was enough to disorient her into wondering whether she'd gotten the wrong first impression of him. But then he continued, "It wasn't as though you were having any luck finding her a husband. No one you'd actually approve of wants to marry into witchspawn."

"Do not use that word in my house!" Ev's father interjected, loud and sudden enough to make her flinch. "Evelyn's magic is no brand on our family! We have done everything right, submitted humbly to Chantry law, put the will of the Maker above personal pride and comfort! That she is standing with us now proves that she has done the same in spite of her trials! If this was a test from the Maker, then damn it all, we have _passed_!"

"And if I disagree, what are you going to do about it?" Jeffrey parried cheerfully. "Disown me? Let the estate fall to Leona and likely wind up stuffing the Carta's coffers? Or will you leave it all to the Chantry, since you're so pious?"

"I just might!" Ev's father threatened.

"You won't," Jeffrey insisted. "And you're out of other options. Leona is gone. Ev is _this_." He gestured at her, the sweep of his hands encompassing the length of her robes. "Face it: I'm all that's left!"

Then everyone started shouting at once, and Ev could no longer make out any of the words.

She walked away. All of this was happening because of her, so maybe it would wind down a bit if she got out of her family's sight for awhile. She knew that wouldn't fix everything — after all, the breakdown had apparently begun while she _was_ out of their sight, and had been for years — but it might help, at least. Besides, she felt nauseated again, and throwing up in front of them definitely wouldn't improve matters.

Pauline shot her a look as she left, but didn't say anything or reach out to stop her. She must have understood what Ev was doing and, at least to some extent, approved.

Ev found her way to the room she had once shared with Leona, closed herself into it, and sat down on one of the neatly made beds. Her parents hadn't used to yell like this when she was a child. She could only remember one fight that had gotten this bad, and it had been right before she'd left. She'd listened to that argument from this very room, kneeling down by the door with her ear pressed against it — though her parents' voices had risen so loud that she hadn't really needed to bother with that.

"So we're just giving up on her?" Ev's mother had shouted at her father. "On Evie? You're really all right with that?"

"It's not 'giving up'! The Circle is the best place for her! Pauline will look after her far better than we can!"

"We could at least try!"

"It isn't worth trying! Maker's breath, have you thought for even a second about what could happen if anything went wrong?"

"Nothing will go wrong! We'll do it safely!"

"There is no 'safe' way to _drown_ someone!"

"That isn't—! Not 'someone'! Not _her_! I would never suggest that! The whole point is that the magic drowns first!"

"The whole point is that it's bullshit and nothing works that way!"

"How can you know that for sure?"

"It's not about what _I_ know! Ask Pauline when she gets here! Ask anyone in my family who actually works with mages! Use your damn brain: if magic were that easy to deal with, why would we even need Templars?"

At the time, Ev had not understood what she'd overheard. Understanding had come years later, when her studies had touched upon common misconceptions about the arcane. Some people, it turned out, believed that holding a child whose magic had just come in underwater could cure them. Some people honestly didn't know that there was only one cure. Hard as it was for a mage who had grown up in the Circle to imagine, most laymen had no idea where the Fomari shopkeepers they saw in marketplaces came from.

Ev hadn't thought about any of this in years. Now she wasn't just remembering it, but looking around at the room from her memories as she did. Her skin felt cold and damp, like she had gotten rained on after all, and her lungs seized along with her stomach, and she had to press a hand over her mouth to hold the bile back.

No one had drowned her here, though. It hadn't happened, because Pauline had stopped it, because Pauline would never let anything truly bad happen to her. Ev knew that, so why was she like this?

"You all right?" Pauline asked, letting herself into the room at almost the same moment Ev thought of her.

"I'm fine." Ev swallowed down the sour taste in her mouth, trying to disguise the motion as a yawn. She didn't think she pulled that off very well, but Pauline made no comment, so it must have been good enough. "I just... never realized before that everyone back here might not be. It never occurred to me that even if I wasn't around them to cause problems directly, I could still cause problems for them just by existing."

"No one wishes you didn't exist," Pauline assured her — which wasn't _quite_ a refutation of anything Ev had just said, but it came close enough that Pauline probably hadn't noticed the difference.

"That doesn't mean they wouldn't be better off if I didn't," Ev pointed out.

Pauline rolled her eyes, but sat down next to Ev and took hold of her hands. "Did anyone ever tell you about your father's sister?"

Ev snorted out a laugh of disbelief. "What, do I have a secret aunt now? Any other family-related surprises you're planning to spring on me today?"

"You don't have an aunt. She passed on long before you were born. Before I was born, too."

"Oh." If Pauline didn't have her hands, Ev could have slapped herself for laughing. "She must have been young, then."

"Very young. Still just a child. She was the oldest, and your father was little more than a baby at the time, so he doesn't remember her very well. My mother does, though."

"What happened to her?"

"They were out on a boat. Not her and my mother, I mean — just Lillian and her parents, your grandparents. She fell overboard, and they weren't able to get her back."

Not just more surprises, then; more drowning. _Children_ drowning. "Why would you tell me that?" Ev demanded. "Why would you—?" She gagged again and tried to pull away, but Pauline held her tight.

"Ev, don't do that," her cousin pleaded with her. "I'm trying to explain. Your parents love you and want you. They may have trouble understanding some things, but they're doing their best. They would _never_ choose to trade you for an easier life."

Which Pauline knew, because they hadn't when they could have. "Oh," Ev said again. Of course it wasn't a coincidence that she and Pauline had been thinking about such similar things at the same time. "And her name was Lillian?"

"Yes. Why?"

"I just wanted to be sure I had it right."

"Don't worry about that. No one is going to expect you to know it. In fact, it would be better if you didn't bring her up."

"I won't," Ev promised. "It feels like an important thing to remember, that's all."

"I suppose." Pauline searched Ev's eyes like she was concerned Ev might be planning something she wouldn't approve of, but didn't seem to find anything — which was good, because there was nothing to find, and Ev would have been annoyed if she'd had to argue her innocence. "Are you up to heading back out there now? Your brother has left the building, if that helps. He isn't the one who will be arranging interviews for you, anyway."

"Well, that's a relief," said Ev. Her head felt a bit light, and there was an unfortunate taste lingering in her mouth, but her innards had calmed down, at least. Better still, even with all this upset, she hadn't heard a single demon. Back in the Circle, they probably would have been buzzing in her ears by now. "All right. Let's go."


	2. A Thing That Happened A Few Days Ago

Ev felt like she was forgetting something.

Earlier that night, she'd been woken up by a Templar and taken to the Harrowing chamber, where she'd never been before. Though she hadn't built up much in the way of expectations about what she would find in this room when she finally saw it, it was still, somehow, emptier than she'd expected. There was a small font filled to the brim with liquid lyrium, and a large sigil worked into the stone of the floor, and nothing else.

The Templar led Ev to the font and then retreated to stand in silence just outside the bounds of the sigil. Nothing else happened for a long time. They were waiting for something, Ev supposed, but for what? More people? Other Templars, Enchanters — maybe a healer to put her back together, if whatever was about to happen involved taking her apart? The fortress wasn't that big, so how long could it possibly take someone to get here from any other part of it?

As time passed, Ev started to wonder whether the test had already begun. Was figuring out what she was supposed to do here a part of it? Or was she really _not_ supposed to do anything? Was she being assessed in some arcane way by something imperceptible to her?

Maybe she could try expanding her perception. Ev closed her eyes and reached inside of herself, feeling out her connection to the Fade.

It struck her like an avalanche, cold and overwhelming. "What—?" she began to ask, but found herself breathless when she tried to speak. Whatever power this was had already buried her. She had _forgotten_ it had buried her, had blithely allowed herself to be smothered without even trying to dig her way out. She'd failed even to notice that she had been suffocating this whole time.

"Well, this is strange," said the Templar. "You really should be dead by now. You usually are. Why haven't they killed you yet, I wonder?"

Why hadn't who killed her? What did it mean she's usually dead? What was going on?

The Templar laughed, low and bitter. "Listen to you. You don't even ask questions anymore. I can hear them rolling around in your mind, but they never make it to your tongue. They broke you of that, like they broke you of fighting back. What's even left of you, Ev? What's the point of continuing this charade?"

"I am not," Ev gasped, forcing the words out through the cold tightening her throat, "the one putting on a charade here."

She remembered, now. She'd been sent to the Fade, and she was supposed to fight a demon.

"Yes, 'demon,'" said the definitely-not-a-Templar. "Despair. Despondency. Desolation. A desert of dessicated dreams. You like words, don't you? Naming things makes you feel like you understand them, and understanding makes you feel like you have some control. But you don't."

It took off its helmet, revealing a woman Ev had never seen before, but who was nonetheless startlingly familiar. Her hair was long, like Ev's had been before she'd cropped it, and flaxen blonde, like Ev's had been before it had darkened to dull mouse-brown. Her sun-touched skin had a rosy glow to it, the color soft and smooth instead of concentrated in blotchy, red blemishes that stuck out like blood on white linen against Ev's pallid face. Her eyes were the ones that Ev saw in the mirror.

She should probably kill it now, Ev thought. But the cold had sunk so deep into her flesh that she felt like if she tried to move, she would shatter.

"Remember me?" Despair asked. "I'm who you used to want to be. Isn't there any part of you that still wants that?"

"You aren't real," Ev told it.

"You wouldn't want me to be. You wanted to be a story-knight, a dream-knight, not a real one. You wanted to be a hero who fights monsters, and when you mostly stopped believing in monsters, you wanted to fight Vints or Qunari, because they were close enough. But that's not what it would be like, if it were real. That isn't who the Chantry is at war with right now. What do you think is going to happen to the apprentices like you, when the rebel camps are overtaken? What do you think is going to happen to the apprentices who are even younger?"

"No. I'm not answering that. I know your game now, and I'm not going to play it. Let's just fight and get this over with." Her joints felt swollen and stiff, her head drained and light, and she would probably die within seconds once the battle started, but she would still prefer that over living only to be tortured and fed on.

"Then you'll have to make the first move, because I don't like fighting any more than you do." Despair said. "It's pointless, isn't it? That's why I usually just wait. The Templars kill you when you take too long, and once you realize you've already lost, what remains of you is mine. Even if I did get out through you, they would kill me, too. But now they're letting the time limit pass, just for you, so maybe this is my chance. Maybe they won't kill me if I become you. Maybe I've fed enough to take them if they try. Or maybe we'll both die, but I don't want to stay like this forever, and I know that you don't, either. If you're ready to go, then so am I."

"Well, I'm not. So I guess you're out of luck."

Despair sighed, its armored shoulders rising and falling with the exaggerated breath. "Then I will have to return to waiting."

They weren't in the Harrowing chamber anymore. Ev hadn't noticed when the scene had changed, but now she stood on a field of ice, like a frozen lake. Or a frozen sea? It stretched out all the way to the horizon in front of her, and at her sides, and if she could turn to look behind her, she suspected she would see it rolling on endlessly in that direction as well.

But Ev couldn't turn to look. The ice encased her legs. It coated her body in a thin but paralyzing crust, and sent out vein-like shoots of frost that spread down her arms and up her neck.

Fire. Ev needed fire. Warm and hungry and eager to grow, _alive_ in a way that the other elements of the primal school were not. She reached for it with her mana, pulled it into existence around her arms to thaw them, then collected it into her hands to hurl at the demon.

Despair dodged easily, leaping to one side and gliding through the air as though its plate armor weighed nothing at all, or even less than nothing. The fireball crashed into the ice and exploded in a blast of frozen shrapnel and blinding steam that scalded every exposed inch of Ev's skin as it rushed past her.

Before she could get her bearings and find where Despair had floated off to, an awful crunching sound rose up from below, thick as the crack of breaking bones. The ground gave way, and Ev fell. Freezing water swallowed her down. Finger-thin currents pried open her mouth and pressed into her throat, gagging her. Her limbs were stiffer and heavier than ever, and moving them felt as though her veins pumped molten rock instead of blood and her muscles had been stuck through with needles, but Ev moved them anyway, because she had to. She kicked and clawed her way toward the light above until her hands found a shelf of ice and pulled herself up onto it. The last of her strength allowed her to surface halfway before collapsing onto her chest, her legs still dangling in the water.

"Well _that_ wasn't a very clever idea." Despair said. It stood over her, and with a wave of its hand the hole in the ice closed around Ev's waist, trapping her again. "You know better than that, Ev. Be still. Be numb. This doesn't have to hurt so. You learned that lesson a long time ago, didn't you?"

"I thought I did!" Ev sobbed out. Tears dripped down her face, their heat and salt cutting through the rime that had begun to attack her already frostbitten and steam-burned skin. "But it didn't work! Everything still hurts, and now I'm not even strong enough to... not strong enough..."

"Not strong enough to what?" Despair asked, giving voice to the question rising in her mind. "To end the pain any other way? You don't have to worry about that. It will be over soon enough, all on its own."

"Not strong enough to live! I don't want it to be over because I'm dead, I want to live!"

"Why? To be a Knight-Enchanter? If you can't defeat me, what makes you think you have that in you? You don't even want to have it in you, knowing what you know now. For Pauline? She'll be heartbroken, I'm sure, but _her_ life has enough meaningful things in it that heartbreak will eventually heal. In the long run, she'll probably be better off without you. The rest of your family has already accepted that you've left them. They're practically strangers to you now. You don't have any friends, and you know there are reasons for that, and that they aren't going to change. So what do you have to live for? Why hurt yourself struggling?"

Ev looked up at this creature in Templar armor, this _thing_ wearing her own face and speaking her own mind, and a tide of deep loathing rose up within her, washing away some of her exhaustion.

How long had it been running this con? How many apprentices had it killed before her? Was it the reason Viola had disappeared?

"Because fuck you," she answered. "That's why."

She reached up with one hand to grab the demon by its ankle, then summoned flame to her other hand and slammed it against the ice.

The ice shattered. Both of them went under. Despair struggled and shrieked, its uncanny voice ringing out even beneath the water. It should have sunk like a brick in that armor, but instead it swam — until Ev tangled its limbs up with her own, and they sunk together.

A storm had been brewing in Ev's heart over the course of her life, an electric charge that had built up for years without release. Now, at the end of everything, she released it. The water around her became like fire, all blinding light and burning pain. The demon screamed again, piercingly loud but mercifully short, as it disintegrated into the shining-hot, electrified sea.

The sea itself vanished with it. Ev lay on the plain dirt ground of the raw Fade, singed and broken and choking as she stared up into the green sky where the Black City hung like a distant storm cloud.

Then the sky vanished too. Ev lay on the floor of the Harrowing chamber, staring up at the helmeted faces of the Templars hovering over her.

"See?" said Pauline's voice. "I told you all! Ev, you're okay. Everything is going to be okay."

The Templars lifted her up. Ev wondered for a moment how she wasn't dripping water all over them, then realized that was stupid. She forced her attention back to the solid reality of the world around her, and wondered instead how the floor of the Harrowing chamber was kept so clean. The blood spilled in the dungeons got left to soak into the stone. Ev had seen the stains. Where was Viola's blood?

Well. _That_ was a strange and inappropriate thought. Fortunately, before she could pursue it any further, Ev felt her consciousness drain away.

—

"Oh, good, you're finally awake," said Belinda. "So, what happened?"

Ev was back in her bunk in the apprentice dormitory, she realized. Belinda, lamentably, was also in Ev's bunk in the apprentice dormitory. The slightly younger girl kneeled on the mattress with her face hovering uncomfortably close to Ev's own, not quite touching her, but definitely breathing on her.

"You know I can't tell you that," Ev said. She wondered whether Belinda hoped that she was groggy enough to slip and spill the secret, or whether she just meant to set Ev up to sound like an ass. "And no one else would tell you either, so no, it doesn't have anything to do with me being anyone's 'pet'."

"I wasn't talking about the Harrowing itself." Belinda grinned, and Ev got the sense she had just walked into a trap. "I don't care about that. It's not like just knowing what it is would be enough for me to survive it. I meant, what happened after? Did your Templar buddies take you out drinking to celebrate, or something?"

"What in the world are you going on about?"

"Hey, I know it sounds farfetched, but there must be some reason they brought you back so late into the morning. And what makes more sense: that, or the star pupil taking longer than anyone else has ever taken to pass the Harrowing?" She looked so pleased with herself as she said it. She clearly thought she'd figured out something that would upset Ev, but the truth was, she didn't know the half of it.

"Have I really been gone that long?" Ev asked.

"You didn't come back until after breakfast. You've seen how it is, right? If someone gets taken away in the middle of the night and then doesn't come back by the time we go to breakfast, they don't come back at all. I thought you were dead for sure." She did not, Ev noted, sound particularly distressed by that thought.

So what the demon had said about time limits was all true, then. Despite what Belinda thought, Ev hadn't taken longer than usual to pass the Harrowing; she hadn't technically passed it at all.

Ev figured she probably ought to feel something about that, but she was too tired to know what.

"Belinda, do you think you could put a hold on harassing me until after the lyrium imbalance has worn off? I'm probably not going to react very entertainingly when I'm like this, anyhow."

"Are you kidding me? This could be my last chance! As soon as you can walk, the First Enchanter is going to call you into her office, for congratulations or whatever, and then you'll be off to the mages' wing with the great big rooms and the great big beds. You won't have much reason to go wandering about the apprentices' wing anymore, unless you're here to mentor someone — and you won't be doing that for at least a few years, and by then I'll be long gone."

"So... I really might never see you again." What a strange thought. She probably ought to feel something about that, too.

"Aw, are you going to miss me?" Belinda crooned. "Maybe just a little? I know we're not friends, but you've been stuck with me for so long, I'm practically your annoying little sister by now, right?"

"Maker, I hope not. If that's how I come across to Leona and Jeffrey, it's no wonder they haven't been writing to me."

Belinda scowled and shook her head in disappointment, making her long, straw-colored braid lash back and forth like the tail of an angry cat. "At least I took the time to talk to you, princess. That's more than you can say for most of the other apprentices. Sounds like it's more than you can say even for your actual sister. But, hey, maybe you'll make friends with the older mages! Or maybe you'll get taken down a peg and realize just how bad you really are at interacting with anyone who isn't afraid of you. Either way..." She hopped off the mattress, finally giving Ev enough space to pull herself up into a sitting position. "So long, I guess. Enjoy having your own bedroom, for those of us who won't ever get that." Then she sauntered out of the dormitory and, as far as Ev knew, out of her life.

—

Ev's meeting with the First Enchanter crawled by in a haze. Just walking to Sofia's office left her breathless and dizzy, and it was all she could do to nod and respond with appropriate gratitude to the standard praise and congratulations and the gift of an enchanted ring. Then a Tranquil woman showed her to her room in the mages' quarters — which, contrary to Belinda's envious expectations, was not _entirely_ her own room, but a double with a screen dividing it down the middle. The other occupant was somewhere else when she arrived, though, so for the moment Ev had more space to herself than she could remember having anywhere outside of a dungeon cell.

She had been told to spend the remainder of the day resting and recuperating, which Ev thought sounded like the best idea anyone had ever had. She flopped face-first onto the bed, and was dismayed to find the mattress so soft that it practically swallowed her whole. That, she realized, would take some getting used to. In her current disoriented state, she kept beginning to drift off only to suddenly notice how strange the surface she was lying on felt, and then jumping up in a panic before she remembered where she was and why.

Eventually, she rolled onto the ground with a thump and decided to try to sleep there, instead. Her surroundings might still be unfamiliar, but she wouldn't see them as long as she kept her eyes closed. One stone floor felt more or less like another, and this was not the first that she'd slept on.

What a ridiculous problem for a person to have: her bed was just _too_ nice. No wonder Belinda hated her. Ev deserved it, and she knew she deserved it, but she still could never manage to bring herself to let the bitter apprentice's jabs at her pass without comment. And now even that wouldn't be an issue anymore.

Ev shouldn't get to have a nice bed, let alone too nice of one. She shouldn't even get to be alive. The Harrowing was meant to prove that she was a capable, trustworthy adult, but it had done nothing of the sort. She had let the demon trick her, and then been too afraid to fight it even when it had showed its hand, and ultimately survived by accident because her childish, self-destructive rage had overwhelmed her childish, self-destructive fear. Worst of all, if Pauline hadn't intervened with the other Templars, she wouldn't have lasted long enough to make that lucky mistake. Now, wherever Ev went from here — to be an Enchanter, or an arcane advisor, or just a simple, cloistered scholar — she would go as a fraud.

"That's the floor you're lying on," said a voice Ev did not recognize. She looked up to see a helmeted Templar standing in the doorway. "Human beings generally sleep on furniture, when it's available. Are you familiar with the concept of furniture?'

"Sorry," Ev mumbled, but did nothing to correct the issue for which she was apologizing, because that would require standing up. The Templar started to approach her, though, and she realized that she had better at least try to sit upright, because talking to him while lying on her back would be weird and rude even by her standards.

She only managed to push herself onto her elbows before he grabbed her by the neck, lifted her up, and flung her onto the bed.

"Don't—" Ev broke down coughing when she tried to speak. Her voice rasped unpleasantly against the walls of her crushed throat. What had she even been meaning to say, though? She used to catch some of the men in the Order looking at her sometimes, back before she'd cut her hair and stopped making up her face, but none of them had ever laid hands on her. She'd had no reason beyond paranoia to believe that any of them ever would, so she'd never even considered how to react if it happened.

The Templar must have seen the terror in her eyes and the way she curled in on herself protectively. "Don't flatter yourself," he growled at her. "If I were demented enough to want to fuck something that looked like a thirteen-year-old boy, I wouldn't even be in this wing of the building." He drew his sword and held the point of it level with and inches away from her face. "This is business, nothing more."

"Wait," Ev choked out. "Where's Pauline? Does she—"

The Templar drew back his sword. Ev screamed and threw her arms up to shield herself as he swung.

The flat of the blade struck her left forearm, just below the wrist. Its edges sliced two parallel gashes into the flesh there. The spray of blood soaked through her clothes and sheets almost instantly, and Ev couldn't tell whether it was the coppery-sweet smell or the sudden burst of pain that made her head spin and her stomach spasm like it was trying to turn itself inside-out.

How many hits was this going to take? Distantly, it occurred to Ev that it might hurt less if she uncurled herself and let the next blow strike her head, but her body refused to respond to that thought.

That turned out to be fine, though, because the next blow never came. "I see," the Templar said slowly. His voice sounded less certain than it had a moment before. "Then I suppose you really are still a demon _asleep_."

Ev lowered her arms and forced herself to look at him, just in time to see him wipe off his sword on the bed sheets and then return it to its scabbard.

"I'll fetch a healer," he told her. "You stay where you are. And put pressure on that cut." Then he left as suddenly as he'd arrived.

Ev stared at the wellspring of blood ebbing and flowing in time to her heartbeat, and found herself mesmerized as though by the rhythmic burble of a garden fountain. She really ought to follow the Templar's order to try to staunch it, she knew, but, once again, she felt strangely incapable of moving in the ways that she knew she ought to. Surely she wouldn't really bleed out from this, would she? It was hard to believe that she would, when she should already be dead.

She should absolutely already be dead, many times over. That she wasn't made the whole world blur into the lazy, tranquil fuzziness of a Sloth-sculpted dream. Maybe it _was_ a dream. Maybe she was a spirit who only thought that she was Ev Trevelyan.

Then again, if she were a spirit, the demons probably would have given up tickling at her mind whenever it drifted toward the Fade. Yet here they were, swarming like midges to the unchanneled power of her blood, so maybe she really was just this stupidly, undeservedly lucky.

"Oh, Evelyn, don't just sit there gaping!" Senior Enchanter Lydia exclaimed in horror when she arrived to find Ev uselessly watching herself bleed. She rushed to the side of the bed, her hands already lit up with magic as they gently took hold of Ev's arm.

"Sorry," Ev said, but Lydia was too busy healing her to either accept her apology or scold her further. First the bleeding stopped, then the pain dulled, and finally the skin knit itself closed. "Thank you. I really am—" Ev coughed again. Right. She'd almost forgotten about that. "—sorry. Could you get my neck, too? I think it might be bruised." Lydia obligingly flicked a wisp of her Faith's power into the hollow of Ev's throat, soothing away the rasp in an instant. Then she moved her spirit-enshrouded hands over the rest of Ev's body, scanning for and wiping away other spots of soreness.

"All better now?" Lydia asked when she'd finished.

"Well, that depends," Ev said, trying with limited success to keep her voice light and joking. "Whoever that was won't come back and do that again, will he?"

"No, he most certainly will not. Whatever anomaly occurred at your Harrowing, Ser Martin is now satisfied that it did not leave you possessed."

"Isn't the Harrowing itself supposed to clear away those sorts of suspicions?" Ev asked. Not that she couldn't see why it had failed to do that in her case, but she didn't much like the idea of being subjected to yet more tests indefinitely. Her luck couldn't hold out forever.

"Yes, it is. Ser Martin's actions were foolish and needlessly cruel — but, as always, there is a silver lining. He was likely not the only knight of the Order with such misgivings, though he was the most vocal. Now that he has convinced himself of your innocence, the others should be convinced too."

"Does Pauline know yet?" Ev asked. "Or am I going to have to be the one to tell her?" She really hoped that she wouldn't have to be the one to tell her.

"Neither," said Lydia. "I will go to her now. You get some rest." She helped Ev lower herself down onto the bed and, before Ev could blurt out any petty complaints about the mattress being too soft, cast a sleeping spell over her.


	3. Moving Up

The main building of Ostwick Circle stood backed against a cliff face and surrounded on all other sides by a courtyard, which was surrounded in turn by the thick wall where the Templars' quarters were located. One wing of the building housed apprentices, the other housed Harrowed mages, and the central structure between them contained a foyer and a library and a grand hall. Ev didn't know the word for that central structure, and neither did anyone she'd asked. The rooms inside of it were collectively referred to as the common areas, but she figured there had to be an architectural term as well, and that she had lived here for twelve years without learning that term itched at her every time she thought about it. She had been meaning to ask her parents when she visited them, but then that visit had gone in such a way that she'd no longer felt like asking frivolous questions.

As it turned out, there were less trivial things Ev still didn't know about this building where she'd spent most of her life. It had been days since she'd moved into the mages' quarters, yet she still kept getting lost in them. Parts of the layout resembled the layout of the apprentices' wing, but that just made the differences even more disorienting.

Right now, Ev wanted to get to the courtyard. She had a slight headache, nothing major enough to warrant pestering Lydia, and hoped that breathing in the scent of embrium blossoms would alleviate it. But she kept getting turned around on the way from her room to the foyer in that-center-thing-she-didn't-know-the-name-for and wandering this wing's halls in circles. There were Templars walking the halls, too, and though Ev couldn't tell them apart with their helmets on, the way they looked at her suggested that she had passed by the same ones often enough that they were beginning to wonder what she was up to. Ev did not want to have to explain herself to them, so when one of them stepped toward her as though he meant to question her, she decided that the garden could wait, and instead looked around for an escape route.

There. That was the First Enchanter's office, Ev was fairly sure. By this time of day, Sofia would probably be at work in it, which meant that it would be unlocked, because none of the doors locked from the inside. As though that had been her intended destination all along, Ev let herself in.

"Sorry for disrupting," she began in a hushed voice as soon as she'd closed the door behind her. "I promise I won't make a habit of this, I just needed..."

Ev trailed off when she saw how the First Enchanter stared at her, and that she wasn't the only one. A large, wild bird perched on her desk and fixed Ev with an equally startled look. Then it leapt up, the beat of its wings stirring Sofia's paperwork into disarray, and exited through the window to the courtyard.

"Does that happen often?" Ev ventured to ask once her voice returned to her. "There weren't any windows in the apprentice dormitories, but there's one in my new room. I'd like to know what I'm in for."

"Unless you've also been baiting them with food, I doubt you have anything to worry about," Sofia answered, her shocked expression melting into a wry smile. She hastily gathered up the papers on and around her desk and shoved them into various drawers. "The feathers they shed can be used for certain charms, so I try to give them reasons to drop by."

"But... you're the First Enchanter. If there's supplies you want, couldn't you just order them from traders?" Sofia had only held the position since about a year ago, when Ostwick had lost its previous First Enchanter to the White Spire, but Ev hoped for everyone's sake that her authority wasn't _that_ curtailed by the circumstances.

"Well, yes, I could. But I enjoy having visitors. Besides, the charms I'm talking about are just some silly old hedge magic, not anything the Circle has a stake in. This isn't serious scholarship, it's a hobby."

"Having a hobby sounds relaxing," Ev said. "I like to work in the garden when I get the chance, but it would be nice to have something I could do with my hands even when I'm cooped up indoors. I don't suppose you'd be willing to teach me about making charms?"

Sofia's smile pressed thin and tight. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat, her black braids clinking with beads as they rearranged themselves across her shoulders. "You probably wouldn't find it that interesting, I'm afraid."

"I... see. Sorry." Ev dug her nails punishingly into her own skin, crossing her arms in front of her to conceal the action. Sofia was Rivaini. Whatever hedge magic she knew likely had roots in Rivain. Ev might not understand the full significance of that even now, but she should have realized much earlier that it meant the specter of Dairsmuid had been hanging over this whole conversation. "I did have some other questions to ask, before I got distracted, but if you're busy right now, I'll just show myself out."

"No, not busy at all, now that my other visitor has left," Sofia assured her. "Ask away."

Well, that was unfortunate. Ev had been hoping for an excuse to leave without having to explain why she'd come here in the first place. At least thinking up some plausible questions shouldn't be too difficult, given how many confusing things had happened lately. "Well, for a start... my new room is a double, isn't it? The other bed _looks_ like there's someone meant to be sleeping in it, but I have yet to meet its occupant." That wasn't really a concern that needed to be brought all the way to the First Enchanter, but it was good enough to buy time while Ev thought of something more substantial.

"Mina has been out on research leave for some months now," Sofia explained. "In light of certain world events, she is taking the long way back."

"Right. That would do it." Not a lot of time bought, there. "Oh! On the topic of leave..." Ev dug her nails in deeper to keep from fidgeting. She wasn't supposed to be doing this. Pauline was supposed to be doing this, after getting the sign-off from the Knight-Commander. "I know that I just went on a daytrip to see my family, but, if you'll recall, the formal purpose of that trip was to meet with people who could arrange a sort of... introduction to other nobles who might be interested in hiring out an arcane advisor?"

"Just bring me the paperwork," Sofia said. "I'll put my signature on it."

"Oh. Thank you." Ev forced her arms back down to her sides, now feeling sheepish about the defensive stance, but could not keep her fingers from curling up to bite into her palms. "But don't you want to know... well, the dates, for a start?"

"I assume those will be on the paperwork."

"Maker's breath." Ev failed to stifle a nervous giggle. "Things really are less strict in this wing of the building."

"That," said Sofia, "can vary."

As though to illustrate her point, the door swung open, and the clank of heavy armor filled the room with echoes. "What are you up to, Trevelyan?" the Templar demanded, and Ev recognized the voice beneath the helmet as Ser Martin's.

As Ev gathered her suddenly racing breath to answer, Sofia intervened. "Is there a problem, Ser Martin?" she asked coolly.

"I heard she was spotted slinking around the halls, and that she ducked in here like a thief on the run when someone tried to approach her."

"I wasn't slinking," Ev said. "I was lost."

"But not keen to ask directions from the guards, for some reason."

"I can't imagine why," said Sofia, "when you're so quick to turn every conversation into an interrogation."

"Yes, that was basically my reasoning," Ev admitted.

"In any case," Sofia continued before Ser Martin could object, "she hasn't done anything remotely thief-like that I've observed. We were just discussing permission for leave."

"Again?" Ser Martin asked. "But she already took a day's leave earlier this week — and that was after being Harrowed just last Wednesday."

"She has an answer to that for the Knight-Commander. I don't see much point in making her run it by you first."

"What is going on here?" Pauline asked, appearing in the doorway behind Ser Martin. "Are you stalking my cousin again?"

"Funny how you go around brazenly playing up her relationship to you, and yet _I'm_ supposedly the one with impure motives," Ser Martin observed. He turned his back on the two mages to address Pauline, and Ev took the opportunity to shoot Sofia a grateful smile. Sofia nodded at her absently, but kept her eyes fixed on the Templars.

"If you have a problem with me, then you can take it up with me directly," Pauline told him. "Leave Ev out of this."

"You say that as though you don't know perfectly well that she _is_ my problem with you. Or emblematic of the problem, anyway. Take all this nonsense about multiple daytrips just to spend time with mummy and daddy. What is this, Dairsmuid?"

Ev felt her guts turn to ice water. Sofia grimaced visibly.

"Are you calling us heathens?" Pauline demanded.

"No, no, not at all." Ser Martin held up his hands in an obviously sarcastic placating gesture. "I only mean that if it isn't acceptable even for heathens, then surely it's beneath such a pious, upright family as the Trevelyans."

"Enough word games. Just say what you really think we are, if not pious and upright."

Ser Martin lowered his arms and straightened himself up to his full height. "I think you're witchspawn laboring under the delusion that it can _bribe_ its way back into the Maker's grace."

"Witchspawn!" Pauline scoffed. "That's a pretty brave word coming from someone who doesn't even know who his parents are."

"My father is the Maker, and my mother is His blessed bride," Ser Martin answered without hesitation. "I neither lay claim nor owe loyalty to any worldly family. Whatever sins stained the circumstance of my birth, the mercy of Andraste has washed them clean."

"Riiight," Pauline drawled out with bitter amusement. "Well then. Maybe you'd be happier leaving all us corrupt sinners to our worldly concerns and heading out to run aimlessly around the wilds with your _brothers_."

"Maybe I would, but I don't believe my happiness is the largest stake in all this. That's the difference between you and I."

 _Between you and_ me, Ev thought distantly. _Pretentious git._ Then, at herself: _Pedantic ass._

"If that's what you think," said Pauline, "then you really don't know me at all."

"I know your sort," Ser Martin insisted. "Your family's sort. You aren't nearly as special as you think you are — and letting you bait me into arguing with you was a mistake. I remember now why your regard isn't worth fighting for. Good day." He moved toward the doorway where Pauline stood, and for one awful moment, Ev thought that he was going to shove her out of his way in order to pass through. But Pauline moved aside at the last second, and Ser Martin marched out of the room and away down the hall without so much as glancing back at her.

"Was there anything else you needed, Ser Trevelyan?" Sofia asked, breaking the uncomfortable silence that followed Ser Martin's departure.

Pauline's helmet swiveled until the eye slit faced Sofia. Not for the first time, Ev wondered what the world looked like from behind a Templar's visor. Did it limit their field of vision as much as it seemed like it should? She wished she could just ask, but even Pauline would probably have trouble believing a question like that was motivated by idle curiosity and nothing more.

"Nothing at the moment, no," Pauline said. "My apologies, First Enchanter, for that... display. Ev, we should talk later. In private." With a short nod to both of them, she turned and left.

As the metal clank of Pauline's footsteps receded down the hall, Sofia let out her breath in a low hiss. Her long, painted fingernails clicked agitatedly against the surface of her desk. "Those two. Bickering over the soul of the Templar Order." She laughed, harsh and staccato, the sort of laugh that Ev couldn't honestly call anything but a _cackle_. "Of all the things that could be said to have a soul." She fixed Ev with a searching gaze. Though Ev didn't know what Sofia was searching _for,_ she instinctively hoped that she wouldn't find it.

"I should go see what Pauline wants," Ev said quickly.

"Suit yourself," said Sofia.

—

Ev did not know where Pauline had marched off to. She also still didn't know how to get to the courtyard, and her headache had, if anything, gotten worse. So, for lack of better options, she decided to return to her room and take a nap.

There was a Templar standing by her bed.

"Sorry," Ev said automatically — which was stupid, because maybe they hadn't seen her and if she hadn't reacted she could have turned around and slipped out quietly before they noticed.

"Don't be," said Pauline's voice.

Ev's panicked thoughts tumbled to a halt, though her heart continued to race. She wished her cousin wouldn't do this sort of thing. At the very least, she could have remembered to take off her helmet.

Then again, it probably should have occurred to Ev that Pauline would go looking for her in her room, since she'd already said that she wanted to talk.

"What did you want to say to me?" Ev asked.

"He's wrong, you know," said Pauline. "About everything, really, but specifically about me. I'm not in this for my own happiness. Everything I've done these past twelve years was all for you. You know that, right?"

"I know," said Ev.

"I think of you like you're my own kid. I could have been at least a lieutenant by now, if I'd focused on my career instead of on looking out for you. But this is the choice I've made, because you're my everything. I just want you to be safe."

"I know, Pauline."

"Things can't go on like this. Ostwick is an island of peace in a world at war, but the waves are rising. Besides Montsimmard, we're the last Circle standing. Ev... you really don't know the half of how bad things are out there."

"So... are you going to tell me, then?" Ev asked, carefully keeping her voice gentle. It would be so easy for a question like that to come out the wrong way.

However it came out, though, Pauline did not respond. She remained silent for a beat before declaring, "I have to get you out of here."

It should have been a shock to hear that, Ev thought, but maybe she'd had too many shocks lately and hit a limit. Maybe her heart couldn't beat any faster without bursting. Maybe her head couldn't ache any worse without cracking open and hatching into some kind of monstrous bird.

She hadn't even tried asking Pauline to help her escape since she was a child. The last time must have been when she was ten. Ev was no longer a child, but maybe that was the point. Maybe Pauline had known that she never would have made it outside the Circle back then, but now had reason to believe that she could manage it.

"All right," said Ev, taking herself by surprise with the calm courage in her own voice. "I'm ready."

"I hope so," said Pauline. "Your parents are arranging a gala for next month. Half the guest list is nobles they hope might be interested in taking you into their retinue. I know it's been a while since you've been around that many people from outside the Circle, but I'll help you prepare."

"Ah." Right. What had she been thinking? Of course Pauline meant that she had to get her out _legitimately_. Ev would still belong to the Circle-as-an-institution. She would just live outside the fortress, that was all. Anything else would be a disaster — an illegal disaster that would inevitably end with her getting herself killed. "Thank you. I look forward to it."


	4. The Thing That Happened with Viola

"Hey there," Viola said one day. "Wanna mess around? You keep looking at me like you wanna mess around."

She had auburn ringlets, the kind that bounced like springs when she walked. Girls with long, dark curls were so unfairly, unbearably pretty. Ev always found herself wanting to reach out and touch them. She often also found herself thinking of Nenaril, which was a rotten, disgusting thing for her to be thinking. Nenaril hadn't even liked her, and now she was dead, and Ev was older than she'd ever lived to be.

"Yes," Ev said anyway. "Maker, yes. Please. And thank you."

Viola laughed like lightning, bright and galvanizing and quick and gone. She took Ev's hand and led her into one of the dark corners of the library that she'd seen other apprentices vanishing into and then reemerging from with wicked smiles and mussed hair — and, oh, Ev was really going to do with Viola what those apprentices did with each other.

Ev grabbed hold of Viola's hair in fistfuls and pulled their mouths together. Viola made a surprised sound that Ev thought for the span of one sputtering heartbeat might be a gasp of pain, but then she kissed Ev back, so Ev supposed she must have been all right with it.

Was Ev all right with it? She'd heard kisses described as tasting sweet, but Viola tasted of skin and sweat and, when their tongues met, saliva. Bland and wet and a little bit salty, more peasant stew than exotic candies, and fuck, Andraste's tits, what was _wrong_ with Ev for her to be thinking things like that at a time like this?

"Your lips are chapped," Viola teased when they pulled apart.

"Not chapped," said Ev. "Scabbed. I bite them."

"Why do you do that?"

"Because I'm always stupidly tense about everything?" She burned beneath her skin, itching and tightly wound, but somehow she couldn't tell whether that was a bad thing or a good one.

"Well, if it makes you less tense, you can try biting _my_ lips," Viola offered. "I'll tell you to stop if I don't like it." She put her hands on Ev's shoulders and dug her long, eager fingers into the ropes of muscle running up Ev's neck, working away the knots with pressure and heat and small, vibrating shocks of electricity. She kissed Ev again, and Ev did bite her lips, and that made them taste different: still not like candy, but a unique kind of sweet with a sharp, metallic tang.

So, all right, this was a good thing, Ev decided. She slipped her hands up Viola's skirt to press her own fingers into the warm curve of Viola's thighs, then into the even softer parts of her. It was a weird thing, and a frightening one, but mostly it was good.

—

They became friends, of a sort. At least, Ev thought of Viola as her friend, and Viola never said otherwise. They rarely found much to do with the time they spent together besides touch each other, but sometimes they also just sat side by side in the library, quietly engaged in the kind of activities that libraries were _meant_ to be used for. Once Ev asked Viola whether she would like to go with her to the courtyard and help her weed the herb garden, but Viola said she didn't like the dirt.

Ev had no other friends, aside from Pauline — and, as much as she loved Pauline, there were a number of ways in which she didn't really count. While comparing her cousin and caretaker to the girl Ev had sex with was a mental path that she did not want to even begin to wander down, she could not avoid resenting that she needed to have sex with someone just to get regular skin-to-skin contact. Pauline always had her armor on around Ev. The last time she'd touched her without her gauntlets had been to show her how to use the cosmetic paints and powders Ev's mother had started sending her in the post when she'd turned sixteen.

Viola teased her about the make up. Ev knew that she wasn't very good at putting it on, and she didn't even like wearing it. It itched, and she kept touching her face in response to the itching and causing it to smudge — but, since her mother had gone through the trouble to get it to her, wearing it just seemed like the right and filial thing to do.

Ev didn't really mind the teasing, anyhow, if it was from Viola, whose jibes always came across strangely affectionate. She didn't seem to view it as a bad thing that Ev bit her nails as well as her lips, or that she had a scar under her collarbone that ran even further down her chest than Viola ever got to see. She just mused about those things aloud as they came to her attention, like they were all delightful discoveries and it entertained her to make them.

It only bothered Ev when Viola laughed about how long Ev took to reach her climax, or how she didn't always make it there before they heard metal footsteps getting too close and had to straighten out their skirts and slink away. Viola sounded like she took it as a challenge, but Ev didn't understand why it should be one. Of course coming apart in Viola's hands felt good, but it wasn't so much better than everything that came with the buildup, the tingling heat and the rising pulse, the touching and tasting and kissing and closeness. Besides, once it happened, all of that ground to a halt, leaving Ev with nothing but the sticky wetness on her thighs that went cold as time passed and made her feel revolting until she found a chance to wash it off.

Viola may have been the first of Ev's classmates to proposition her, but she wasn't the last. Usually no one pressed the issue when she turned them down, but one day Algernon decided to be difficult.

"It's really weird that you only ever do it with Viola," he told her, as though that would make his thick shoulders and stubbly chin any more appealing. "You do know that it's weird, right?"

"I know," Ev said. "I just don't care."

"Viola still does it with other people."

"I am aware of that, yes, but I'm less outgoing than she is."

"I guess you can call it that, if you want. To the rest of us, it just looks like you're obsessed with her. It's creepy."

"I am not obsessed with her. I would rather never have sex with her again than have sex with you even once."

"Why? I can't be that bad. Viola does it with me, too."

"Fuck off," Ev told him, and stood up from the library table where she'd been studying to relocate somewhere with more people around, because if she had to look at his ugly, leering face for two more seconds she was going to put a lightning bolt through it.

That was what finally pushed her to crop her hair, though she'd been toying with the idea for some time. Her head felt lighter afterward, and she didn't need to spend even half as long brushing it each day — and, since she didn't particularly like the indecisive dishwater-blonde color it had turned these past couple years, there'd been no sense in having that much of it to begin with. Maybe she would let it grow out again if it ever got to be as dark as Viola's.

As for her mother's cosmetics, Ev left the jars out in the open behind the lavatory screens, where they would be free for the taking according to the unspoken rules of the dormitories. It felt good to spread around some of her excessive luck to the other apprentices for a change, though they probably wouldn't thank her or even necessarily realize that she'd done it on purpose.

"No fair," Viola whined playfully the next time they met up. "Now when you pull my hair, I won't be able to get you back."

"Not in kind, maybe," Ev said. "But I'm sure you'll think of something." They kissed, and Viola giggled into her mouth.

—

"Ev, wake up! I have a surprise for you!"

Ev opened her eyes to see Viola leaning over her with a wide, pearly grin, her hair hanging down to tickle Ev's face. Ev wasn't generally much of a morning person, but in that moment she considered that maybe she'd never given mornings their fair due.

"I'm listening," said Ev.

"Well, that's pointless of you, because this isn't the sort of surprise I would waste by just telling you about it. Come on, follow me!" She took Ev's hand and pulled her out of bed, then out of the dormitory.

"Should we really be out here this early?" Ev asked nervously. The halls seemed strangely empty, but that didn't mean a patrolling Templar couldn't turn a corner and discover them at any moment.

"We'll be fine! I'm a full mage now, and I'm giving you permission." Once Viola said that, Ev noticed that she had traded her sack-like apprentice robes for the more shapely and elaborate ones that Enchanters wore. Had she gone through her Harrowing already? Viola was a couple years older than Ev, so that would make sense.

They remained lucky enough not to run into anyone all the way to the mages' wing. Viola led Ev into a room with a four-poster bed, then closed the door behind them. Sparks flew up in Ev's chest and fluttered down to settle in her stomach when she heard the click, because oh, she and Viola had an actual closed door shielding them from the rest of the world now.

Viola undid the clasps on her own robes, letting them fall to the floor in a velvety green pool around her ankles. Beneath, she had already taken off her smallclothes, and finally Ev could see in full splendor the parts of Viola's body that before she had just fumblingly felt. Only a thicket of dark curls veiled the mound between her thighs, and her breasts were round and pale and tipped with berry-pink and just the right size to fill Ev's hands, if only Ev could work up the nerve to reach out and take them.

Instead, she reached for the clasps on her own robes — but, before she could undo them, Viola touched her arm and staid her hand. "Wait," she said, and Ev stopped what she was doing and watched, transfixed, as Viola pulled a sheet off the bed, twisted it into a makeshift rope, and looped that rope around the two posts flanking the headboard. Then she lay down on the bed and gripped the ends of the sheet where they hung down from the posts, twirling her hands to so that the fabric wrapped suggestively around her wrists. "All right, now you come help me out. I can't do this part on my own."

"This part..?" Ev's voice cracked. Compared to Viola, she sounded hideous.

"Mm-hm!" said Viola, smiling and unfazed. "The part where you tie me down and touch me however you want to. Surprise!"

"Viola!" Her face must have been such an ugly shade of red, judging by how hot and prickly it felt. "I don't... I mean... Why would you..?"

"It's all right, Ev. I know how much you want this. How much you want me. How much you want to be the one in control, the one with all the power, strong and wanted back instead of helpless and hated and hurting in ways you don't have the words to describe."

"That's—" Ev gulped down the denial. How could she possibly deny it, if Viola somehow knew before she did? Why would she even want to deny it? "Yes. That's yes." She approached the side of the bed, took up the nearest end of the bed sheet-rope, and bound Viola's wrist to the post. The steadiness of her own hands surprised her. "That doesn't hurt you, does it?"

Viola flexed her fingers and tested the linen with a sharp tug. "No, not at all."

"I don't want to hurt you."

"You can, you know. Just a little. I won't mind, and I already know you like to bite."

"Just... tell me if it's too much, all right? I'll stop right away if it's too much."

"I know you will. That's why I love you."

Ev froze.

"Ev?" Viola's adoring smile scrunched up into a pout. "What's wrong?"

"Too much," Ev said. "That's too much. This isn't..." She squeezed her eyes shut but could still see the room, as though it had been painted on the backs of her eyelids. She still saw the bed, and the makeshift rope, and the clothes left discarded on the floor. She still saw Viola.

Except she didn't. Because that wasn't Viola.

"Oh, come on," said the creature, still pouting. "Can't you just play along? I'm giving you everything I've got here."

And Viola would never do that, would she? Why had Ev let herself believe that of everyone Viola liked enough to touch and be touched by, she would choose Ev to do this with her once she got a room to herself? Did Ev think she was special? How conceited could she get?

A scream came welling up from the base of her throat, and her eyes flew open, and her hands lashed out against the demon with a flash and a thunderclap. The demon shrugged off the blow without any apparent effort, so Ev decided not to stick around to test its strength. The next shock she made smaller and delivered to her own forearm with a pinch, waking herself up.

—

The next time that Viola — the real Viola — reached out to take Ev's hand and lead her off to some shadowed alcove, Ev recoiled from her. "I don't think we should do that anymore," she said.

"Oh. All right. Did I do something wrong?" Viola looked... not heartbroken. _Crestfallen_ , Ev decided. That was a better word for it.

"No," Ev reassured her, "you didn't. You couldn't. You're wonderful and beautiful and sweet and... You didn't do anything wrong."

"Did someone else?" Viola covered her own mouth in mortification. "No, you don't have to answer that, I'm sorry. It's just... I hope you're okay. I like you a lot, and I want you to be okay. And if you aren't okay, there's probably nothing I can do, but if there is—"

"No, no one hurt me," Ev said quickly, her stomach twisting at the realization of the lie she'd almost told by omission and how it could have tricked Viola into feeling sorry for her. "No one's ever really hurt me. It's always just _me_. Did you know I put that scar on my own chest? It's lightning. You could tell that it was lightning, right? I'm my own worst problem. I'd rather not be a problem for anyone else."

"You've never been a problem for me."

"It's not that I think I have been, yet. It's just..." How could she explain it? _I made you into a demon?_ That didn't make any sense, even to herself. So why did she feel hot beneath the skin in a bad way instead of a good one whenever she looked at Viola these days? What was she so ashamed of? Wanting to try new things? If she just flat-out told Viola that she wanted to see her naked and maybe tie her up, the worst Viola could do was say no. Or she could laugh at her, Ev supposed, but that wouldn't be the end of the world either.

None of it made sense when Ev tried to break it down — but maybe that just went to show that this feeling was more than the sum of its components. Demons, and touching, and bound wrists, and love, and control, and _hurting in ways you don't have the words to describe —_ and Viola. Viola didn't go with the rest of it. She shouldn't be a part of it. Not only would it be imposing on her, but Ev neither needed nor wanted that one extra snarl in this awful, dark tangle clogging her chest. Of all the threads making up the knot, Viola was the only one Ev had a way to cut out.

"Well, it isn't _just_ anything," Ev admitted. "It's a lot of things, and they add up. But they all come from me. Not you. Not anyone else."

"Okay," Viola said. "I don't want to make you uncomfortable, so I won't ask anything else. But if you get it sorted out, let me know, all right? I won't hold any of this against you. I still like you a lot."

"Thanks," said Ev. "I still like you, too. And I will — let you know if I get it sorted out, I mean."

—

Ev didn't get it sorted out, and one morning Viola wasn't in her bed, and then it wasn't even Viola's bed anymore because that afternoon a Tranquil came into the dormitory to strip it.

Nothing much changed. Ev went to meals and did her studies and washed up at the end of the day and went to bed again. She wasn't distracted, and she didn't have trouble sleeping, and she didn't cry. After she and Viola had stopped sneaking off together, they'd gradually spent less and less time with each other, so there hadn't been a lot left to miss — which, Ev knew, was an explanation but not an excuse. She should have given Viola more of her time when she was alive, but instead, she benefited from failing to do that by not missing her now that she was dead.

When she finally did cry, it was a whole day later in the library, with everyone watching and nothing even prompting it, so she must have just looked crazy. Ev tried to keep reading, at first, but she got some of the pages wet, and that would be bad if it went on, because these books were valuable. It didn't feel like the tears were going to let up anytime soon, though, so she gave up and ran off to hide.

There weren't many good hiding places around. All the ones Ev could think of were places that would make her feel worse, but that would still be better than crying out in the open where people could see. She slipped into the closest one, a space behind a bookshelf where the wall was a bit uneven, and sat on the ground there and wept into her knees.

What in the world was wrong with her? Ev had seen people disappear like this before. If she hadn't, she wouldn't know without having to ask that Viola was never coming back. She hadn't broken down this badly over any of the others. Did they matter less because they weren't as pretty? Because they hadn't been as nice to her, personally?

She wondered if Pauline—

Oh, yes, that would be so dramatic, wouldn't it? That would make it all about Ev, just like everything always should be. Maker preserve her, she had to stop thinking like this, had to stop mentally placing herself at the center of the whole world. That kind of delusional self-fixation could lead a mage straight into the claws of demons.

"I don't see why you're so broken up about this." Ev lifted her head weakly to find Belinda standing over her, then dropped her face back into her knees and tried to pull them even more tightly to her chest. "Seems a bit out of character, if you ask me. I mean, this one wasn't even your fault!"

"Fuck off," Ev mumbled.

"I'm just saying, it could be worse. Always nice to know that it could be worse, don't you think?"

"Go the fuck away!" Ev managed to uncurl herself enough to shoot a glare at the other apprentice.

"Or what? You'll sic your cousin on me?"

She might be angry enough to push herself to her feet and storm off, now, except that Belinda stood in her way, and the space between the bookshelf and the wall was too narrow for Ev to slip past her. "Maybe I will!" she threatened instead. "Maybe I really will, this time!"

"Eh, go ahead, then." Belinda raised her hands up level with her shoulders in a theatrically exaggerated shrug. "How long have I got left anyway? Three years, probably? If you wanted that to be scary, you should have said it a lot earlier."

"Why are you pretending you don't believe I'd really do it?" Ev demanded. "You only think it's okay to treat me like this because you think I'm the kind of person who would really do it!"

"I treat you like this because you deserve it," Belinda said, as though that were any kind of substantial response to what Ev had just asked her.

"I do not deserve it!"

"Yes, you do!"

"No, I don't!"

Belinda burst out laughing.

"What exactly do you think is so funny about this?" Ev asked.

"You are!" Belinda crowed. "And me! I'm hilarious!

"Viola is dead!"

"So are a lot of other people, princess!"

Ev stood up. "Get out of my way," she said.

When Belinda's only response was to grin back at her defiantly, Ev shoved her to the side and ran.


	5. A Day on the Town

"Good day, Ser Trevelyan," an elven Fomari woman called out as Pauline and Ev passed by her stall in the Ostwick marketplace. "This is an unusual context for us to encounter each other."

"Shit." Pauline stopped walking so suddenly that Ev nearly ran into the back of her chestplate and bashed in her own nose.

"Is something wrong?" Ev asked. Pauline spun around to look at her in alarm, then turned to the Fomari stall. Ev followed her gaze, only to notice seconds later that Pauline had gone right back to staring at her. "Did _I_ do something wrong?"

"No," Pauline said at last, her sharp grimace softening into a mild, sheepish frown. "You're fine. It's nothing that affects you. Sorry, I didn't mean to make you worry."

Had Pauline assumed she would react badly to seeing a Fomari in the marketplace, where Fomari obviously would be? Ev felt vaguely insulted just by the idea. She wouldn't claim that she enjoyed the presence of the Tranquil, but she was used to them enough that she could avoid causing a scene over it.

Though to be fair, Ev reminded herself, it would be far from the most innocuous thing she had ever caused a scene over. Besides, though the primary purpose of this trip was to buy some things for Ev that she hadn't been able to own before she'd had a room to put them in, it also served as a sort of test run for the upcoming gala. More than a decade had passed since she had seen so many strangers in one day, let alone interacted with them. Pauline was right to be wary of how she would handle it.

"You do seem to be perturbed," the Fomari woman observed of Pauline. "If you wish to strike me, I would suggest that you avoid my face. I am, in much the same sense as my wares, on display out here. A bruise would not make for an attractive storefront."

"What? No! Of course I'm not going to hit you!" Pauline sounded mortified, which Ev was relieved to hear. She certainly hoped that her cousin didn't make a habit of beating on Tranquil mages when she wasn't watching. "Why, did you do something?"

"The tasks I have recently completed include, in reverse order: selling four rings, two amulets, and one cowl; enchanting three amulets with wards against poison and three more with wards against fire; responding to a summons from the First Enchanter; cleaning the east wall barracks—"

"All right, that's enough," Pauline said, rolling her eyes.

"Thank you, Ser Trevelyan," the Tranquil woman answered in the same steady tone. If she noticed Pauline's obvious exasperation with her, she did not react to it in any way.

"May we move on now?" Ev asked, taking special care to keep her voice unrushed and unworried. She meant to make a polite request, not wheedle or demand anything. Whatever Pauline thought of her, she would not cause a scene here.

"Yes, I think that would be an excellent idea," Pauline agreed. She started walking again, and Ev followed her.

—

Ev didn't mean to get separated from Pauline, exactly. If she'd tried a little bit harder, she might have been able to stay by her cousin's side when the market crowd suddenly surged around them, but she also might not have been able to, and it wasn't as though she hadn't tried at all. So she didn't have to feel guilty about that, and she also didn't have to feel worried, because there was no danger whatsoever that Pauline would be unable to find her again.

In the meantime, Ev was free to move about the shops on her own. She quickly passed by the ones peddling clothes or food or weapons or trinkets, and only stopped to take a closer look when she found herself at a dwarven bookseller's stall.

"Are these the ones you make with the machine?" she asked. In her excitement, she only belatedly realized that she'd forgotten all about greetings and introductions, and did not particularly care. "The... what do you call it? The press! Like for wine!" Hearing about printing presses always put Ev in mind of a great metal vise squeezing the ink out of stacks of paper, though she knew the reality was basically the opposite of that.

"Right you are, messere mage," said the bookseller, the corners of his mouth twitching in amusement. The technology must have long ago come to seem utterly pedestrian to him, Ev knew, but that did nothing to quell her own enthusiasm.

She picked up one of the books on display to examine it more closely. Running her fingers along the edges of the pages, she found they were so perfectly aligned in the binding that they felt almost smooth to the touch. Though the covers seemed sturdy enough, the leaves pressed between them were thinner and more fragile-feeling than such fresh paper ought to be, to the point Ev worried she might tear them just by turning them. Sheepishly, she looked back up at the bookseller. "Sorry, I should have asked earlier: is it all right for me to be handling them like this?"

"Go right ahead," he answered with an encouraging nod.

Ev flipped through the book — not slowly enough to actually read it, at first, but just to get a feel for it. As she approached the back cover, she thought she saw her own name jump out at her from the pages, and abruptly halted and reversed course to find it again.

There: _Evelina_ , the thick, blocky lettering said. Not Evelyn, but close enough that she could see how she'd made the mistake. Ev decided that was as good a place as any to start reading.

_"Evelina would never hurt you, child. That was a demon. Remember her as she was: a brave, kind, loving woman." Hawke spoke in that weirdly gentle tone of voice she seemed to reserve for kids and dogs. With an abomination's blood splattered all over her armor, it sounded even more out of place than usual._

The book slipped from between Ev's fingers and thumped against the others piled on the table. "You all right there, messere?" the bookseller asked.

"I'm fine," said Ev with a small, startled laugh. "So what if it's not just dwarven books, but _the_ book by _the_ dwarf? Why wouldn't it be? If it's popular enough even I've heard of it, it must be in demand." She'd completely forgotten that sort of thing was allowed out here.

"I hope you're not thinking of setting my stall on fire, messere," the bookseller said with a strained smile. "Someone else tried that a few days ago and didn't have much luck, but I fear a mage would make a better go of it."

"I'm not," Ev assured him. "I wouldn't dream of it! As a matter of fact..." She stopped herself, made herself swallow and breathe and _think_. It was a mad impulse, and she knew that it was mad — but fuck it, what in her life since the night she had been taken into the Harrowing chamber wasn't madness? At least this was her choice. "I would like to purchase a copy, please."

"Well, it _would_ be one thing or the other," the bookseller sighed to himself. "That will be ten silvers, messere."

Oh, right: coin. There were plenty of young mages in the Circle who had no real reason to remember about that, but Ev wasn't one of them, and she flushed at her own stupidity. Purchasing things took coin, and Ev didn't have any when she didn't have Pauline with her.

"What about this?" she asked, pulling the chain her Ring of Study hung on from around her neck and offering it to him. "I know there's a lot less silver in it than there is in ten coins, but it's enchanted, so that should help."

"I don't sell enchantments, messere," said the bookseller.

"But you must know someone who does. Couldn't you sell it to them?"

"Messere, this isn't a barter shop!" Ev supposed she must have done something objectionable, because the poor dwarf tangled a hand in his beard and started anxiously fiddling with it. "Look, you don't even want me to agree to this, not really. Even I can tell that ring has to be worth at least twice as much as a pulp-paper novel — and, need I remind you, _I don't sell enchantments_."

"I don't mind! And that means it's definitely a good deal for you, right? It's not like I'm going to come back and burn your shop down if I regret it later. I won't have a chance to leave the fortress again for weeks, and it could be months or even longer before I make another trip to this marketplace."

"I'm not interested, messere," he insisted. "If you don't have the coin, then good day to you."

The mad energy that had spurred Ev on began to drain away. What would Pauline think if she reappeared now and caught Ev harassing the merchants like this? "Right," she said, forcing her voice down to just above a whisper. She could not keep the emotion out of it entirely, but as long as she spoke low enough, no one would be able to hear that. "Good day. Sorry for the trouble."

She gave the books on the table one last, longing glance before reluctantly turning to go — but then a new idea seized hold of her. "Are you with the merchants' guild?" she asked, pivoting on her heels.

The bookseller lurched backward when she rounded on him, like he'd only barely managed to stop himself from jumping away in fright. "That depends on what you mean by 'with,'" he answered after a moment spent visibly gathering back his nerves. "But I am a member, yes. Pay my dues, and all that."

"Have you heard of a Leona Trevelyan?"

"Messere, I don't really care what connections you have. The answer is still no."

"What? No, this isn't about the book! It's just..." Ev paused to work backward through her own leap in logic, trying to find the words to explain it. "I want to make something happen for myself, for once. I have a chance to do that now, and I don't know when or if I'll get another one. I can't read the book that everyone is so worked up about, but maybe I can find out where my sister is and if she's doing well."

"Maker's sweaty ballsack!" The bookseller tugged at his beard so fiercely, Ev worried he would tear it out of his chin. "No, I don't know your sister! I don't even know why you think I would! Just take a blighted copy, if it means that much to you!"

"Really? Thank you so much!" Ev probably ought to have been more disappointed about Leona, she knew ‑ but she could feel bad about that later, when her heart wasn't jumping around in her chest too much to let her. For now, she held the chain with her ring hanging from it back out toward the bookseller.

"Keep it," he told her. "I don't want the blasted thing."

"It's better than nothing, isn't it? I'm not trying to rob you." When he still declined to take it from her hand, Ev dropped it on the table. "Really, I insist." She picked back up the copy of _Tale of the Champion_ she had flipped through earlier, and tucked it away in the folds of her robes. "Thank you again. I won't forget this."

"I think I would prefer that you did," the dwarf muttered as she turned and left.

Ev didn't know if there was a decent way to respond to that, so she just kept walking.

—

To prevent the book from slipping out of place and bulging suspiciously beneath her robes — or even falling to the ground and getting lost — Ev kept her arms wrapped tightly around herself as she walked. Some people shot her strange looks as she passed by, and Ev couldn't exactly blame them. She would probably also be wary of a mage walking alone through a public space and acting so furtive about it. To avoid causing too much alarm, she found a side alley with little traffic and ducked into it to wait, relatively out of sight, for Pauline to find her.

When some hours passed without that happening, Ev started to worry. Shouldn't it be easy, as long as she stayed put in one place? Maybe Pauline had assumed that was what Ev had done from the beginning, but then realized that she was on the move and... and what? She wouldn't think that Ev seriously meant to run away, would she? What would she do if she did think that, if not just keep searching and hope to be proven wrong? Go back to the fortress for reinforcements? She wouldn't. There was no way, especially not after such a short time. It would explain what was taking her so long, though.

Ev really should have just stopped and waited patiently the moment she'd realized she'd gotten lost. Pauline would probably be angry that she hadn't, even aside from any questions she might have about why she hadn't. Maybe she was leaving Ev to sweat about it because she was angry? That would make sense. Ev supposed she deserved that much, while she definitely did not deserve to be hunted down by a squad of less friendly Templars that might or might not include Ser Martin. Looking back, she suspected she'd behaved the way she had at least in part to distract herself from her own worries about getting separated and how Pauline would react when they found each other. Being forced to face those worries in magnification seemed like a fair consequence.

"Ev! There you are! What are you doing hiding back here when you know that I'm looking for you?"

Ev pushed off from the wall she'd been leaning against, stood up straight, and forced herself to meet Pauline's eyes. She noted that her cousin looked more concerned than angry — but that wasn't necessarily a cue to relax, because the two tended to go hand in hand for Pauline. "I wasn't hiding from _you_! I wasn't really hiding from anyone, just... trying to stay out of people's way. And also mostly out of their sight, I suppose. I didn't think it would hurt anything, since you have my phylactery."

"Yes, I do have it, but I'd prefer not to pull it out in the middle of a crowded street if I can help that!"

 _Why not?_ Ev wondered. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize that."

"Use some common sense next time, maybe?" Pauline sighed. "I'm sorry too, though. I had this whole thing planned out where I was going to surprise you at the end of the trip by taking you to a dressmaker and getting something fitted to you for the party. Now it's too late for that. We have to start heading home." Taking Ev's wrist to avoid losing her in the crowd again, she led the way back to the main streets.

Ev did not feel particularly disappointed about missing out on a surprise that would have involved a stranger prodding at her with pins and needles, but she kept that to herself. She wasn't about to insult Pauline for wanting to do something nice for her. "It won't be a problem if I just wear my Circle robes, will it?" she asked instead. "Isn't this sort of thing why the ones they give us after the Harrowing are so fancy?"

"They aren't _that_ fancy, Ev. Not compared to what ladies wear at court."

"Maybe you can use the measurements I had taken for them to get a dress made, then."

"That's what I'm planning to do. I'm just sorry I couldn't take you with me and let you pick something out for yourself."

"What do I know about fashion? I'm sure I'll be happy with whatever you get for me." Ev thought of the scar on her chest. "As long as it has a neckline at least as high as the one on my robes."

"Really? That's your top priority?" Pauline laughed and rolled her eyes, like she was amused and annoyed at the same time. Ev hoped that she was more amused. "If that's what you really want, then that's what I'll look for, but I think you should reconsider. Just about everyone is wearing scoop-necks this season, so it will make you stand out. And for you in particular, that's not a good way to stand out."

"Why for me in particular?" Whatever the answer, Ev doubted it could be worse than the way she'd stand out if she went around exposing anything beneath her collarbone.

"Ev, you do know how you tend to come across, don't you? With the way you cut your hair, for one? Not that I'm asking you to grow it out again. I know it's much too late for that."

"Do I come across as someone who would prefer not to be ogled by random men? Because I am that."

"That isn't what I mean! You just have this aura of... prickliness. Distance. Untouchability."

"That's all right, then. I really don't want anyone touching me."

"Would you just listen and stop being difficult? I already said it isn't about that!"

 _What is it about, then?_ Ev wanted to ask — but that wasn't fair, Pauline was clearly attempting to explain, and Ev pressing her on it would just interrupt her attempts by forcing her to defend herself instead. "Sorry. I'll listen. Go on."

"It's more about how mages are perceived, even the good ones no one worries will get possessed. You all seem so aloof: cloistered away in your towers, more concerned with arcane minutia than with any of the sorts of things normal people care about. That isn't the sort of person anyone really wants as a courtier."

"I didn't realize that 'normal people' cared so very deeply about how much of strangers' chests they get to see," Ev blurted out before she could stop herself.

"That's not the point!" Pauline stopped walking and turned to face Ev fully, dragging her closer as she did. Ev wrapped her free arm a little more tightly around herself, and not just to be certain that the book remained secure. "I'm not claiming to be an expert on fashion, but I have been out of the fortress more than twice in the past twelve years, so I think I probably know a little more of the subject than you do. It's not all about which parts of your body you show off, it's about the signals it sends. And one of the things it can signal is how much you want to be a part of the lives of the people around you."

"Sorry," Ev repeated. "I really do need to keep my chest covered, though. Everything else is up to you, but you wanted to know if I had any preferences and... I do. That's my preference."

"Fine. You could have just said it like that from the start, instead of cracking wise with me." Pauline still had Ev pulled in close, and took the opportunity to look her over slowly. "To be clear, it isn't just your clothes and hair. There are a lot of little things that add up, like the way you hold yourself — _literally_ hold yourself, even. Stop doing that."

With the hand not currently clamped around Ev's wrist, she pried Ev's arm away from her chest. Struggling against it would just make things worse, Ev knew, so instead she focused on breathing shallowly in hopes the book would stay put as long as it didn't get jostled about too much.

"I didn't mean that you have to hold your arms perfectly straight at your side," Pauline said. "Just relax. Be natural."

"I'll try," said Ev, and immediately regretted it. Speaking while barely breathing was not a good idea. It made her dizzy, and if she stumbled or fell then the book would slip out for sure.

The lightheadedness also set her mind brushing against the Fade, and that gave her an idea. She threw out a thread of mana — not too much, she would be seen if she used too much — and thought of ice, a thin case of frost to hold the book against her skin beneath the linen. Ev had never been much good with ice or stone, and this was probably the worst plan ever, because if she made a mistake she could end up spearing herself right through the heart. She already had all the water she needed, though, in the humid air and in her own sweat-damp clothes, so all she had to do was pull it in around her chest and tip the scales of its nature in the other direction.

Cold instead of hot.

Sculpted instead of shapeless.

Fused instead of diffuse.

Unmoving. Unyielding. Let it even be brittle, as long as it was strong enough to hold.

There. Just like that.

Ev's eyes unclouded. Pauline must have said something while she had been elsewhere, because now she looked at Ev as though she expected some sort of response.

Ev nodded solemnly. That was apparently a sufficient answer, because Pauline turned away and started walking again, leading Ev to the carriage that would return both of them to the Circle.

—

Ev's room now contained such luxuries as a rug at the foot of the bed, a mirror on the wall, a small collection of perfumed soaps on the shelf by the washtub, and a stack of books piled in the wardrobe. Most were books of history or geography or poetry, but one of them was different, and that was the one that Ev most often pulled out to read over the course of the next few weeks.

She wasn't entirely sure what to make of it. It felt cozy, somehow, more like listening to someone talk than reading a history, but maybe all novels were like that. Ev had never read one before, so she had no way of knowing. It was also less provocative than she'd been expecting. The heroine killed Templars, but all of them were breaking the law of the Chantry in one way or another, and they were far from the only sort of criminals she hunted down and ruthlessly slaughtered. She had a Dalish blood mage in her band of adventurers, but Merrill honestly seemed almost harmless compared to the rest of Hawke's friends. Of course, the book was ultimately about Anders and the Kirkwall uprising as much as it was about Hawke and the Qunari invasion, but not quite in the way that Ev had assumed it would be. She got the sense that the author didn't much like Anders' politics, that he only even partially forgave him because of everything else Anders was, the jokes and the healing and the way he made Hawke smile.

Then again, maybe all that was _why_ so many people were angry about this book: it made being an apostate sound almost normal.

Ev knew that she shouldn't get too drawn in to rooting for Hawke. It was fine to the extent that she was a character in a book, but she was also a real person, and she had killed real people. She and Anders were still out there, and if they ever came to Ostwick, they would bring the war with them.

On the bright side, they would definitely kill Ser Martin. Ev had to admit, if only to herself, that crazed apostate rebels tearing the bastard to shreds was a little bit fun to think about.

They would also kill Pauline, though.

Ev needed to remember that. She couldn't let herself forget what war really meant, or just how many people would die in it. She couldn't let herself believe that she wanted anyone to die to for real, not even Ser Martin.

If she did want that, she would be most of the way to becoming an abomination.


	6. A Thing That Happened with Belinda

"Evelyn, you will go first today," Lydia announced. "Barrier up."

Ev held herself at her full fourteen-year-old height as she left the group lined up against the wall and crossed to the middle of the courtyard, then turned around to face her instructor and fellow apprentices. She knew that Lydia choosing someone to take the lead in an exercise like this was a show of confidence that pupil would succeed with little difficulty. If too many apprentices made mistakes too quickly, the Senior Enchanter risked running out of healing magic and having to call off the lesson early.

Once she was in position, Ev opened herself up to the Fade and let it flow through her, let the unreality well up from her skin and cover her like a coat of oil, fluid and glimmering.

Lydia nodded once more at the row of apprentices. "Belinda, you will assist her."

"Right! 'Assist'! Sure thing, Senior Enchanter!" Belinda stepped forward, giving herself enough space from the others to work her hands in wide arcs through the air, gathering and shaping mana. "You ready for this, princess?" she asked, her smirk glinting like the flames flickering into and out of existence around her arms.

"Do your worst," Ev told her, defiantly smiling back.

Ev saw the fire flare around Belinda's hands, and then it was upon her. Whatever came between passed too quickly for her to follow. Her senses all but gave way to the heat, though it was only the heat of standing a bit too close to the hearth, not of being shoved inside. The barrier held, and as the flames lashed against it and then dissolved, Ev thought that they looked almost pretty.

"Perhaps that was _slightly_ excessive, Belinda," Lydia noted dryly.

"Not really." Belinda shrugged. "Ev's just fine, isn't she? Why wouldn't she be fine, since she's so awesome?"

"She has a point, Senior Enchanter," Ev cut in as Lydia arched her brows the way she usually did right before a scathing lecture. "I am pretty awesome."

"Very well, then." Lydia's face relaxed. "You may now switch places."

Some discreet snickers could be heard from the apprentices along the wall.

"What?" Belinda took a faltering step backward, as though she were trying to blend back into the line. "No! You can't be serious. Ev will kill me for real!"

"As you just correctly noted, Belinda, that comes down to the strength of the barrier."

The snickering spread.

"Don't worry, Belinda," Ev said, "I'll go easy on you." She disappointed herself by being unable to restrain her amusement enough to deliver the line in a deadpan.

"Ugh, no thanks! I think I'd rather die."

The snickering rose to a crescendo, until the Senior Enchanter shot everyone a look sharp enough to cut it off.

Belinda walked out into the middle of the courtyard, and Ev took her place just in front of the wall. "Barrier up!" Lydia said, and Belinda answered the call with a wave of her hands and a flash of light. Ev reached into the Fade for a spark of electricity — which always seemed to be the first weapon to find its way into her grasp — and let it coil and build around her arms for just a heartbeat before firing it off at Belinda.

When the lightning hit home, the thin, ethereal sheen surrounding the other girl popped like the soap bubble it resembled. Belinda screamed and fell, and hit the ground while still convulsing.

"She's faking," Ev said.

Lydia strode swiftly over to Belinda and kneeled down next to her.

"I barely put anything into that."

Belinda went still.

"She has to be faking."

Lydia's hands lit up, and Belinda gasped and shot upright as though waking from a nightmare.

"I will hold off for the day on critiquing your form and requiring you to correct it, Belinda," Lydia said once she had finished healing her. "I suspect that you have already learned a far more valuable lesson. You are dismissed."

Belinda swayed a bit as she got to her feet, but when her gaze landed on Ev, she glared intensely and steadied herself, as though the eye contact were something solid she could lean against for support. Then she turned and stalked off without a word, her head held high all the way back to the door of the main building.

The lesson went on. Lydia did not call on Ev again. Other apprentices received minor burns or bruises when their barriers failed to absorb the full force of the attacks leveled at them, but no more disasters like what had befallen Belinda occurred. It took a while before anyone felt much like laughing at anything, but by the end of the exercise, the wisecracks and snickering had made a comeback.

When it was over, Ev went to find Belinda.

She checked the dormitory first. Belinda was not in her bed, so Ev turned to head out and search the common areas, but then she heard a poorly-stifled sob coming from behind the bathing screens. Following the noise, she found Belinda lying curled up like a pill bug in an empty washtub. Tears streaked her face, and she clutched her long braid to her chest like a child might hold a rag doll.

"I'm sorry," Ev told her.

"Of course you are," said Belinda wearily.

"I didn't mean to."

"Of course you didn't. It's my fault for not being good enough. Right?" Her words were bitter, but all the venom in her voice had run dry.

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to. You don't have to say any of it. I already know. So can we just skip over this part and get on with our lives, please?"

"I could tutor you," Ev offered. "Help you make your barrier stronger."

"You think I haven't been trying to? I've already got Enchanters to mentor me, but sure, one more apprentice giving pointers will make all the difference in the world."

"Isn't it worth a try?"

"For you, maybe. You've got nothing to lose but time, and you have a lot more time than I do. At least sixty years, probably. Maybe seventy, eighty, even a hundred." She kneaded her hair pensively, a motion like wringing out wet cloth. "I can't imagine what that feels like."

"You could have all that too. There's nothing stopping you."

"Nothing but my own weakness, you mean? Or my own laziness, in letting myself stay weak?"

"No! Of course it's not your fault. I know you need help, so let me help you!"

"No thank you. You don't really want to help me. All you want is to be able to say when the end comes that you did the best you could. Even if you didn't. Even if all you did was what was safe, or what was convenient. You're no worse than anyone else about that, but I'm not going to be your charity project just to let you feel like you're better. You aren't, and you don't deserve to feel that way."

"Is this still about Nenaril?" Ev had only been a child, then — which wasn't an excuse, but now she was older and knew better. She wanted to _do_ better.

"No, Ev, it's about me. I'll be going the same way she did soon enough, with or without your _help_." Belinda spat poison with the last word, as though she had found some deeply hidden reserve inside herself and tapped into it just for that. "I wish you had killed me out in the courtyard where everyone could see. Then you and Lydia would have felt bad about it for the rest of your lives. But you couldn't even do that much for me, could you?"

"I want to do more than that. I want to help you live."

"Why me? Why not any of the other apprentices who are struggling? Go bother one of them instead. I already hate you for being smarter and luckier than me. I'll just hate you more if you try to be nicer, too."

"It's not a competition, Belinda!" Ev had been trying to keep her voice calm and comforting, but now she found herself losing patience.

"Who told you that? Your cousin?"

"Pauline doesn't have anything to do with this!"

"She's a Templar. She has everything to do with it. They all do. The two wings of this building are the same size, right?"

"Come again?" That seemed like an awfully abrupt change in topic.

"And each mage in the other wing has more room than each apprentice in this one, right?" Belinda continued, undaunted. "They get their own washtubs, and their own beds that aren't bunks, and space to keep personal belongings."

"What are you getting at?"

"You're supposed to be the smart one. Do your own math."

Ev thought it over. When she got it, her stomach twisted and her head swayed. "That's..."

"A problem?"

"Not necessarily," she argued, more to herself than to Belinda. "Not all the bunks here are always occupied."

"Neither are all of the beds in the other wing."

"There's the ages. Everyone from five to twenty sleeps on this side."

"And everyone from twenty to ninety-nine sleeps on that side. If anything, that makes it worse."

"But people sometimes get to leave, once they've been Harrowed. They go to the Wardens, or—"

"Or to be some noble's pet, yeah. But not enough of them. Trust me, I've _tried_ to make it work. It just doesn't."

Ev's skin crawled as though dripping with cold water. She didn't want to be around the washtubs anymore. What was wrong with her? It had been years since she'd had a problem with washtubs all on their own. She crossed her arms and dug in her nails, determined to see this through. "That still doesn't mean there's some conspiracy, though. It could be the other way around. When they set it all up, they already knew what the numbers tended to be like."

"Right, but that was hundreds of years ago. You're telling me that no one's even tried to get better at teaching mage kids for hundreds of years? That would be bad enough if it were true, but it probably isn't. They don't need it to be. They get to decide who even has a chance at the Harrowing in the first place. If they're ever in a pinch, they'll just take as many of us as they don't have room for and make us Tranquil. They can do that. They can do whatever they want to us!" Belinda shuddered and broke down sobbing, and stuffed her braid into her mouth to quiet herself until it passed. When she pulled it out again, she concluded, "So I might as well die. Someone has to. Why not me? It sure won't be you, princess."

It could have been, though, if Ev hadn't gotten better. If Pauline hadn't made her get better. "I have to go," she said.

Running in the opposite direction from the lavatory when she felt like she might throw up was maybe not the smartest thing Ev had ever done, but it definitely wasn't the stupidest thing she'd ever done either, and she could not think of any better options.

—

Ev did not sleep very well that night, which wasn't particularly a problem. There was a demon in her dream, so she woke herself up and then couldn't get back to sleep before morning came. That sort of thing happened sometimes.

It happened again the next night, though. She dreamed about Templars pulling her out of bed and dragging her off to her Harrowing, and she _knew_ that she wasn't ready, how could she possibly be ready, it was six years too early for her to be ready. Her only chance was to let the lightning through, all of it at once, and bring down the fortress around her — but that couldn't be right, because if Ev had never seen this happen to anyone else, then how could it happen to her, when she was one of the lucky ones? She took only a pinch of lightning, and she used it to jolt herself upright in her bed.

The night after that, it wasn't the Harrowing chamber they dragged her toward, but the dungeons. Ev had been to the dungeons before, many times, but that was years ago. If she went there now, she might never make it back up. She almost hadn't made it back up last time. Pauline might not help her again, if Ev had spat upon all her past help by acting out like she used to. Pauline had already tried everything she could think of to save her, even things that had clearly been a last resort. What had Ev done wrong this time, though? She'd hurt Belinda, of course. But the Templars didn't care about Belinda, so how could that be it? It had to be something else, but there wasn't anything else, and that meant that none of this was real and she had to wake up, so she did.

It wore on her. The day after the third dream, she could read only a few sentences of her books at a time before the letters began to drift apart in front of her eyes. She could barely understand the words that other people spoke to her. Her head felt full of smoke, dark and dry and hot. If only she could take a day to do nothing but sleep, however many times she had to wake herself up and then calm herself back down, then maybe she would be all right — but what could she possibly say to be let off from her studies? If she claimed to be sick, Lydia would probably get called in to check on her, and she would see through the lie in an instant.

When she slipped beneath her sheets that night, a demon appeared above her. Its long, spiderlike limbs anchored it to the four corners of the bed, bending at impossible angles to lower its gnarled body down until its face hung just inches from Ev's own.

Ev shocked her own arm. She screamed and jolted upward and nearly knocked her head against the demon's — maybe _did_ knock her head, though she didn't feel a thing, since its jagged teeth and burning red eyes filled her view so completely that she had trouble understanding how she could have avoided it — before forcing herself back down on the mattress.

If she couldn't flee, she would have to fight. Ev lifted her hand and fired a bolt upward, but the lightning passed clear through the twisted thing's body to crack like a whip against the ceiling.

She really couldn't touch it, not with her body and not with her magic. It must have still been in the Fade, though Ev herself was not. She had simply grown tired enough that her waking mind reached partway across the Veil.

The demon grinned at her. "They'll all see now," it said. "They'll know that you're slipping. What will you do then?"

"They'll ignore me," Ev hissed at it. The only people around were other apprentices. "That's what we do here."

It looked like the same one from the first night. Had it been stalking her this whole time?

"Got your scent," it said. "Wounded you, made a trail. Bleeding hart, I'll track you like a hound."

So that was all: she needed to sleep. Just one night of dreamless sleep and Ev might be well enough to lose this demon.

"You can't!" it crowed. "Heart's hammering too loud, bang bang bang! You'll be mine first."

Then she needed to stop her heart.

"What? Stupid! You'll die!"

That seemed likely, but at least she wouldn't take anyone else out with her. Maybe she would even do the opposite. One more empty bed —  _that_ would teach Belinda.

"You'll die, though! It will hurt like nothing else and then you'll die and the Void will take you—"

Ev pressed her hand against her breast and summoned lightning for the third time that night.

—

When she woke up — it could have been minutes later, or seconds, or hours — Ev hurt all the way through, but at least the demon was gone. She still felt more tired than pained, so once she'd worked out that she wasn't dead, she fell asleep again.

She didn't dream at all.

Only when she woke up for the second time, after a full night's sleep, did she finally grasp just how stupid she had been.

There was nothing for it now, though. Her chest had been badly burned and would probably hurt for days or weeks, but her only option was to hide it. If she went to Lydia, she would have to explain what had possessed her to do this to herself. More to the point, she would have to explain what had _almost_ possessed her.

Ev tried not to groan too loudly as she climbed out of bed and got herself ready for breakfast.


	7. The Castle Ball

Pauline got the leave forms signed by the Knight-Commander, and Ev took them from her and brought them to the First Enchanter herself. After the way she'd seen Sofia react to Pauline earlier, it just seemed like the thing to do, and Pauline had enough other business to attend to that she didn't question it.

Ev knocked on the door, and Sofia welcomed her in without hesitation. There were no wild birds on her desk this time. After a brief greeting, Ev handed Sofia the papers, and the First Enchanter began to read through them.

Ev always felt a little bit awkward standing about uselessly while someone else read in her presence. Her eyes wandered around the office in search of something interesting enough to distract herself with, and landed upon the academic illustrations that the First Enchanter had pinned to the walls. There were maps, star charts, botanicals, and, bizarrely, a cutaway of a slaughtered pig.

Once she'd noticed that last one, Ev was struck by an urge to get as far away from it as possible, and moved to take a closer look at an illuminated monograph on embrium hanging in the opposite corner. As she approached it, a decidedly stranger feeling struck her. She was, very briefly, very dizzy. Her perception of the world twisted around, then abruptly snapped back into place.

The monograph forgotten, Ev halted and took a step backward. There it was again — more persistent, this time, as long as she did not move. Was that a mana influx? It felt like a mana influx.

Ev looked down at the floor. There was a rug, but when she tried surreptitiously pushing back the edges of it with her toe, she found no glyphs painted beneath it. None of the glyphs she'd ever heard of had an area of effect this small, anyhow.

Something about the rug itself niggled at her, though. The weave was colorful and complex, but somehow inconsistent. Only when Ev crouched down to take a closer look was she able to identify the anomaly: an unfamiliar sigil embroidered in black yarn, its arcane figures almost indecipherable amid the chaos of the wider pattern. Ev reached out to touch it, and felt raw magic spark against her fingertips. While the rug as a whole appeared to be made of cotton, the black yarn felt different. It felt more — but not entirely — like wool.

It felt, Ev realized, like a person's hair.

"Pretty, isn't it?" the First Enchanter asked pleasantly.

Ev jumped back up out of her crouch, then mentally kicked herself for acting so guilty.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you," Sofia said with a wide smile that she probably meant to look reassuring.

"It's fine," said Ev. "I'm fine." She had nothing to be nervous about, did she? Hair wasn't the same as blood, whatever its source. Material from a mortal body it might be, but not vital material. It could be grown, shed, and regrown without consequence — like feathers. "Is that a Rivaini pattern?"

Maker preserve her, she just couldn't resist pushing her luck, could she?

Sofia remained smiling. "Oh? Are you familiar with it?"

"No. I just... made an educated guess."

"I see! You really are sharp, aren't you?"

"I'm happy to hear you say so," Ev mumbled out as graciously as she could manage.

How bad could it be, really? Maybe it was nothing more than a mana channel for powering complicated spells. There were worse ways to do that, ranging from smuggling lyrium to performing blood sacrifices, and not a lot of better ones. Or maybe if it _was_ a summoning circle, Sofia only used it to talk to benevolent spirits. Or maybe it did summon demons, but also kept them bound and then banished them once she'd finished with whatever perfectly legitimate thing a First Enchanter might be doing to summoned demons.

Surely there were no worse possibilities than that last one. An incarnate demon would not be easy to hide in an office, or anywhere in a building patrolled regularly by Templars — except within a person's body, of course, but if Sofia were an abomination and Ev had just discovered how she'd become one, she probably would have attacked by now.

Somehow, none of that trail of logic felt as comforting to Ev as she'd hoped it would be when she'd started down it.

Sofia held out the now-completed papers. "Good luck getting out of this forsaken Void," she said as Ev stepped forward and took them from her.

"Thank you," said Ev. "Even if all goes well, though, I'll be back here at least one more time, for a little while."

 _So I have a strong incentive to say nothing about your hedge magic "hobby" to anyone_ , she did not add, but she hoped Sofia understood that part anyway.

—

Ev's dress was gorgeous, and she hated it.

The neckline was high enough to hide her scar, if only barely. The construction was simple enough that Ev could mostly put it on by herself and only call Pauline into her room to lace up the back once she had her chest covered, so that was another upside. Pauline had evidently gone through some trouble to pick out a color that would neither emphasize how pale Ev was by contrast nor make her look like a washed out ghost in equally washed out, ghostly clothing, and the sky blue she'd settled on very nearly accomplished that, though it had the unfortunate side effect of setting off the red of Ev's blemishes. Pauline helped Ev cover those up with cosmetic powder, and Ev knew she had no hope of arguing against that, nor against painting her lips to hide the scabs and her eyes to hide the dark circles beneath them. Even with all that, though, the frilly, lacey, silken confection was obviously completely wasted on her. It would have looked so much better on a girl who was prettier to start with. Viola came to mind, however much Ev desperately wished she would stop doing that.

"Where's your ring?" Pauline asked when she'd finished making Ev up. "You should definitely wear it."

Time for the conversation about that, then. Ev had gotten away with it for the better part of a month, which was pretty good, all things considered, and more than long enough for her to have figured out what to say here. "I lost it. I had it on a necklace, remember? The chain broke, and I didn't even notice."

"And you didn't mention this until now, because..?"

"I think it probably happened at the marketplace. I know it was around my neck when we set off that morning, but not when I got back to my room and started setting up my new things. I didn't want to bother you with it, since I knew you'd never find it even if you raced back out right then, and I'd already caused you enough trouble that day. I guess I'd hoped it might be somewhere in the fortress after all, and that I or someone else would stumble across it eventually, but that obviously didn't work out for me."

"Ev! Really?" Pauline's voice jumped in volume, and she huffed out an exasperated sigh, but then she continued more softly, "Well, I guess there's nothing we can do about it now."

Which was true, and also exactly what Ev had been counting on. Even though the two of them would be stuck together on an hours-long carriage trip to the Trevelyans' mountainside villa, Pauline would be unlikely to use that opportunity to berate or interrogate Ev further, since she wouldn't want to wear her out emotionally before they even reached the party.

Ev knew she was being sort of a manipulative bitch. She also did not feel nearly as bad about that as she thought she probably should.

—

The longer Ev wore her gown, the more intensely she came to dislike it. The lace cuffs itched. The petticoat was far too warm compared to the loose, thin skirts of her usual robes, and by the time she stepped out of the carriage, she had sweat dripping down the backs of her legs. The stiff leather of her new shoes cut into her ankles as she walked. Why couldn't she at least have worn her slippers from the Circle? They wouldn't have clashed too badly with the dress, and besides, who was going to be looking determinedly enough at her feet to catch more than a glimpse of them beneath all the frills lining its hem?

Ev couldn't help but envy Pauline for how effortlessly she seemed to pass between worlds. She had enough natural beauty to look a little bit pretty even in heavy, functional armor and with her sweat-darkened hair pinned up in a severe bun. Here at the gala, with an elegant emerald dress and ruby-painted lips and her hair loosely braided and washed clean enough for the gold to show, she looked absolutely radiant — though somehow still imposing, albeit in a different way than usual, like a queen rather than a knight. It all came down to the way she moved, a sort of purposeful glide with her shoulders held straight but not tense. If her shoes pinched even half as badly as Ev's did, she didn't let it show. Maybe, Ev thought wistfully, when you were comfortable in your own skin, it didn't matter so much what you wore over it.

The gardens of the family villa were grand, though not quite as wide as Ev remembered from her childhood. Roses of a dozen different varieties not only sprouted from bushes but hung from vine-covered trellises arching over the footpaths. Irises and daffodils crowded around a large fountain, and lilies floated within. Water burbled out pleasantly from beneath the stomping hooves of a marble stallion, and the warbling songs of wild birds joined in as accompaniment. The humidity felt much less oppressive outside the close quarters of the carriage, and all in all it was a beautiful day to be outdoors, so naturally Pauline led Ev directly to the house's front entrance and straight on through to the interior.

Indoors was louder than outdoors — which made perfect sense when Ev thought about it, since there were more people packed into a smaller space, and all their voices echoed. Still, it ran counter to what she'd grown used to. The courtyard was by far the liveliest part of the Circle, since it was the only place in the fortress where mages could raise their voices or engage in more raucous training exercises without rebuke, and the stone walls surrounding it trapped the sounds within only slightly less effectively than this ballroom with its tile floor and vaulted ceiling did. Ev hoped that she wouldn't get a headache from the noise, since there was no embrium here to inhale if that happened.

Since she was already wishing for herbs from the Circle garden, Ev couldn't help thinking an elfroot salve would be nice for dabbing in the sores on her feet. She could even make it into a poultice so that the leather would rub against the bandages instead of chafing her skin.

"All right," said Pauline. "Let's split up here."

"Split up?" Ev asked.

"It will look a little weird if you're clinging to me," Pauline explained. "Don't worry, though, it's not like I'm going to ignore you. I'm here for you. I'll try to find people who might be interested in talking to you and bring them over."

"What should I do until then?"

"Whatever you want. It's a party, so you should enjoy yourself."

"Can I go back out to the garden?"

"Sorry, but no. That would make it a lot harder for me to find you again. You could try talking to people on your own, if you feel up to it. Or you could just, I don't know, walk around looking at the art on the walls and wait for someone to come talk to you."

"So parties are all about talking, then?"

"And dancing and drinking, but I wouldn't recommend you try either of those just yet." Pauline gave Ev's arm an affectionate squeeze and smiled reassuringly at her. "It'll be fine," she said, then turned away and drifted off into the crowd.

The paintings on the walls were mostly portraits of Trevelyans past and present striking uninteresting poses and looking nearly as uncomfortable as Ev felt. Some of the female subjects were pretty, at least, but they were also related. Ev gave up on art-browsing as soon as she spotted the food table, and made her way toward that instead.

The food table had blackberry tarts. Or tartlets, maybe? They were as large around as the palms of Ev's hands, and she didn't know what the cutoff was. More importantly, they were piled full of whole, fat blackberries drizzled in glaze made of their own sugared juices.

It had been years since Ev had seen uncrushed blackberries. Her mother sometimes sent jams made out of them because she knew that Ev loved them, and because she did not understand there was nowhere in the apprentice quarters to store such things, nor any easy way of incorporating them into the meals served at the dining hall. Ev always ended up sitting on her bunk and eating them straight out of the jar with her bare hands, like the family disgrace she was.

The fresh berries reminded Ev of the last time she'd come up to this villa. She had been seven years old, and when her parents had gone out hunting with the other adults, she had snuck past the servants and wandered out into the woods. She'd found a wild blackberry thicket and waded in, heedless of the thorns, to gorge herself on the plump, sour-sweet fruit. When she'd stumbled back to the villa as the sun began to set, she'd been scratched up from head to toe, covered in bruise-colored juice and her own oozing blood, and thoroughly, blissfully happy. Her parents, who by then had worked themselves into a panic over her absence, had of course been cross with her at the time, but they'd forgiven her easily and laughed about it later.

Strange to think, now, what would likely have happened to her if she'd pulled the same stunt again just a year later.

"Ev, how many of those have you eaten?"

Ev turned away from the table to see that Pauline had found her way back to her. "I don't know," she admitted. "My mind started to wander."

Pauline's suspicious glare gave way to an expression of panic. "You aren't supposed to do that!" she hissed. "You're supposed take a pastry and nibble on it and _leave_ , not hover over the tray shoveling them into your mouth one after another!"

"Oh," said Ev. "Maybe you should have filled me in on that earlier."

"Of course. This is my fault for assuming you would be capable of using common sense. What was I thinking? And now you've ruined your make up, and there are crumbs on your face, and—" Pauline took a deep breath to steady herself. "No time to fix it. He's right on my heels."

"I'll just have to make myself sound clever and competent, right?" said Ev. "I'm trying to secure a job, not a husband."

"At least don't talk with your mouth full," Pauline pleaded miserably. Then, in a much cheerier tone and to a gentleman about her own age as he came up beside her: "Lord Auldwin! This is the woman I was telling you about, Callum and Darlene's youngest. Evelyn, this is Lord Edmond Auldwin."

Well, that was strange. Ev couldn't remember the last time that Pauline had called her by her full given name, and she certainly couldn't remember anyone ever calling her a woman. When she wasn't just a mage, she was usually a girl.

"A pleasure to meet you, Lord Auldwin," Ev said with an awkward bow of her head. She had a half-eaten tart-or-tartlet in one hand and a napkin in the other, so she could offer neither of them for a handshake.

"The pleasure is all mine," Lord Auldwin said, graciously returning the bow. "You know, I think this is the first time I've been introduced to a mage."

"That's all right," said Ev. "It's been at least twelve years since the last time I was introduced to a lord, so we're almost even."

Lord Auldwin laughed obligingly. "May I see?" he asked. "I mean, if it's safe here."

Ev looked to Pauline, who nodded, then set her napkin down on the table and the remains of her pastry down on the napkin. "All right," she said, flexing her fingers. "Stand back a little, if you would be so kind."

Pauline and Lord Auldwin moved to give her space, and Ev reached into the Fade and found what she wanted to fill that space with. Sparks of lightning flew from her fingertips, resolving into the form of butterflies that flapped their way across the distance between herself and her audience before disintegrating back into sparks and crackling out of existence.

Lord Auldwin laughed out in astonished delight and made a show of applauding. Pauline smiled.

"I've seen something like that once before," Lord Auldwin said. "In Orlais. A great dragon made of fire that did three laps around the room before exploding in a burst of colored light."

"I wonder if a mage from Ostwick made it all the way out there," Ev said. "Our Circle concentrates on the primal school of magic, which tends to be... both over- and underrepresented at the same time, if that makes sense? It's the first thing laymen generally think of whenever they think of magic, the fireballs and the ice barricades and all those sorts of battle-oriented spells, but most people, even mages, underestimate the potential depth to the discipline. For example, your dragon? It makes sense that it was bigger and more persistent than my butterflies, because that's fire in a nutshell. I'd imagine that the challenge for a spell like that is making it hold its shape and keeping it from expanding and incinerating a large swathe of the room."

"Wait," said Lord Auldwin. "Really?"

"Lightning, meanwhile, is more precise. If you gave me an hour or so to prepare, I bet I could cook you up a really impressive dragon — but it would only last for a split-second, not nearly long enough for you to appreciate all the detail work."

"And then it would explode and kill people?" Lord Auldwin's smile had turned decidedly strained.

"What? No, it would just... stop being. That's what lightning tends to."

"Ev, you've gotten blackberry glaze on your dress!" Pauline exclaimed. "Lord Auldwin, would you excuse us for just a few minutes? I should go help Evelyn freshen up before the stain sets."

"Certainly," said Lord Auldwin. "Good day, Lady Evelyn. Our chat has been... illuminating."

Pauline had just taken hold of Ev's wrist, and Ev had responded by desperately stuffing her mouth with the last of the blackberry tartlet — which, even if it had started out large enough to be a tart, certainly no longer was by this point. She did, in fact, know better than to talk with her mouth full, so the only response she could offer Lord Auldwin was a sheepish little wave as Pauline led her away.

—

"Are you _trying_ to mess this up for yourself?" Pauline asked. They had relocated to an upstairs washroom, and Pauline had gotten ahold of a wet rag and begun scrubbing furiously at the spot on Ev's dress.

"Of course not! Why would I do that?" While Ev couldn't say that what she'd seen of court affairs so far particularly appealed to her, it was still better than being stuck in the fortress for the rest of her life — especially considering that might not be very long at all, if the wrong person found out about the First Enchanter's little secret.

"That's what I'm trying to figure out! Because it sure doesn't seem like you'd have any reason to, and yet, the moment I get you an opportunity, you start babbling on endlessly about fire and lightning!"

"That's bad, I take it? All I am to these people is that one Trevelyan who's a mage, and I'm trying to convince them that I'm skilled enough to be a useful addition to their court... but I'm not supposed to talk about magic?"

"I'm not saying you shouldn't talk shop at all, but it isn't just about skill and usefulness. I've already told you that it's about fitting in, too. Instead of playing into their preconceptions about who you are, try letting them get to know you as a person."

"But who I am as a person... is a mage. The Circle isn't exactly the best environment for cultivating a wide variety of interests." _Or a strong sense of self_ , Ev did not add out loud.

"You can be witty when you put your mind to it. There has to be something you could manage a bit of light banter about. The gardens? The food? You seemed interested enough in those stupid sweets. Ugh, it looks like you got some on your skin, too." Before Ev realized what was happening, Pauline had pulled down the collar of her dress. "How did you even manage to get it this far..."

She trailed off, and Ev followed the path of her horrified stare to the lightning scar on her chest.

Funny thing was, Ev actually found the scar itself quite pretty. It looked a bit like red ivy climbing the trellis of her skin, or like the veins of an embrium petal held up against the sun. The only ugly thing about it was the story it told.

"What is this?" Pauline finally asked.

"A lightning scar. It's just a stupid mistake from years ago, all right?" Mistake was a useful word. It meant almost the same thing as accident, but if Ev called this an accident, she could wind up getting caught in a lie. Mistake gave her room to retreat.

"Whose 'mistake'?"

"Mine. I was fourteen and stupid. All kids that age are stupid." All kids around that age at least considered killing themselves — or most of them did, anyway, judging by what Ev had seen and heard. Having actually attempted it made her a little worse than the ones who stopped at considering, but at least she'd only done that once, which was better than she could say for some people she knew.

"Why didn't you get healing?"

"Because then I would have had to explain how stupid I was, and that would have been deeply embarrassing?"

"Not as embarrassing as that scar!"

"Why? It's not like anyone with any reason to care is ever going to see me naked."

"You can't know that!"

"I... hope that I can?" Ev took a step back, away from Pauline's hands and the damp cloth dripping cold water onto her half-exposed chest. "Or that I can at least have some level of control over it, moving forward? I admit, I was also hoping that _you_ wouldn't find out, but I did manage to hide it from you for six whole years, so..."

"No, Ev," Pauline said, bringing her voice down low and almost pleading, "I mean you can't know everything that will happen in the future. Or I thought you couldn't, anyway, but this might rule some things out, and that makes everything more difficult for both of us."

Ev stared at her, trying to unravel the strange tangle of words. "I'm sorry, could you repeat that?"

Pauline groaned in frustration. "Look, all I'm trying to say is—"

Before Pauline could elaborate on what she was trying to say, the knot in Ev's mind suddenly came loose. "Wait, seriously? Well, shit!"

"Ev! Since when do you use that sort of language?"

"Is that why this whole ordeal has felt more and more like a marriage interview the longer it's gone on?" Ev demanded. "Andraste's tits! Void take it all! The one thing that I thought I wouldn't have to deal with! The _one thing_ that I thought I could stack against all of the garbage piling up in my life!" Furious tears fell from her eyes. They would probably turn her eyeliner absolutely hideous. Ev was glad for that. She wanted to look ugly, and she wanted an excuse to wash all the crud off her face.

"Ev, calm down. This could be a good thing for you! You prefer women, right? There are plenty of noblewomen who have had their children and are basically done with their husbands and start looking elsewhere within their own courts."

"And then we get into a lover's quarrel and she sends me straight back to the Circle?"

"Well, you could always try _not_ quarreling."

As though that would ever be possible for her. Ev had thought that she'd grown out of screaming arguments years ago, but here she was pitching one now. She wrapped her arms around herself and sunk to the floor and wailed.

"Ev, come on. You have to pull yourself together and get back out there," Pauline said.

Ev buried her face in her knees so that she wouldn't have to see her cousin's frustration and disappointment. "No!"

"So what then? You're going to give up?"

"No! I just—" Ev gagged. Giving up was the last thing that she wanted to do, and she needed to tell Pauline that, but she could barely even breathe.

"Do you really think you'll be better off staying holed up in the Circle for the rest of your life?" Pauline pressed her. "I might not always be around to protect you, Ev! Whatever it is you're so afraid of, I guarantee that it could be even worse if you do nothing."

She could feel the hands on her arms and neck, cold and hard and merciless. Electricity flickered over her skin, trying to dislodge them, but they could take that from her, too, and then it would just hurt more.

"Ev, stop!" Pauline's shout hit home at the same moment as the cleanse, and Ev couldn't tell which it was that knocked her down the rest of the way, just that in the end she was lying prone on the floor, powerless and chilled and choking on her screams. She remained limp and unresisting when bare, warm arms wrapped around her and hauled her up.

"I guess I really won't be able to get you back down to the party," Pauline said as she half led and half carried Ev out of the washroom and deeper into the house's living quarters, where the other guests would be less likely to venture. "That's okay. It will be okay. We'll think of something."

Right then, though, Ev couldn't think of anything but the way that her guts pitched and her skin crawled.


	8. The Thing That Happened with Nenaril

Nenaril was the most beautiful girl Ev had ever seen. She had chocolate brown hair that hung to her waist in waves, and a soft, round face. The way her awful, oversized apprentice robes kept sliding down made Ev's fingers itch to reach out and touch the freckles on her shoulders or the elegant curve of her collarbone. Nenaril's own fingers were long and slender, and Ev often found herself thinking for no reason she could understand about the way they would move over the strings of a harp. Ev had met enough elves before that the almost uncanny beauty of their wide eyes no longer startled her, yet the intensity of Nenaril's amber stare remained startling enough to make Ev's heart skip when it fell upon her.

Nenaril looked to be a year or two older than Ev was, which would make her thirteen or fourteen, which in turn would make her just slightly too old to have avoided the Circle for so long in innocence. Some of the other apprentices whispered the word "apostate," both in excitement and in fear. Ev overheard one Templar say something about a "captured apostate," and while she couldn't be entirely sure that he meant Nenaril, she had her suspicions, because Nenaril behaved like a captive. She was sullen, frequently refusing to speak and glaring daggers at anyone who tried to force her, even the Templars. She resisted participating in lessons, and when her resistance broke, she often answered the Enchanters' questions in ways they declared incorrect — yet the spellwork she demonstrated in practical exercises was more powerful and precise than that of any of her classmates. Sometimes, Ev heard her crying softly at night.

She shouldn't be here at all. Ev thought that had to be obvious, but no one else said it, so she didn't say it either. Still, she couldn't stop herself from thinking it. Nenaril didn't need the Circle to teach her, and she didn't need it to shelter her from people who wouldn't understand. Clearly someone else had done that for her, and done it well, before she'd been dragged away from them.

Someone ought to do something. Ev ought to do something. She was still going to be a knight someday, and Nenaril looked a bit like a princess in a tower from one of the illuminated storybooks Ev remembered reading when she'd been younger. But Ev wasn't a knight yet, and she had no idea what sort of something ought to be done, because Nenaril would never deign to say more than three words at a time to her.

The only person Nenaril would talk to at length was Belinda, who was a year younger than Ev but had been at the Circle two years longer. Ev developed a bad habit of hovering just a little too close when the two of them were together. She knew that eavesdropping was wrong, but Belinda seemed in every way unexceptional to her, and she was desperately curious why Nenaril liked her so much. Maybe if Ev figured that out, she could get Nenaril to like her, too.

Unfortunately, figuring out anything at all about the friendship between the two girls proved more difficult than Ev had anticipated. They kept their voices low, and Nenaril's strange, lilting accent obscured half the words whenever she forgot herself and spoke up. As far as Ev could tell, she mostly seemed to talk about places: forests and mountains and plains, the plants that grew in them, the wild animals that roamed them, the rivers and streams that ran through them. Belinda, for her part, prompted her with questions and sometimes said something about her own mother. Ev picked up just enough of it to be intrigued without actually learning anything. That frustrated her, but the peculiar melody of Nenaril's voice kept her listening anyhow.

"I'd like to hear about the outside world too," Ev was unable to stop herself from blurting out one day.

The two friends had huddled up on Nenaril's lower bunk as though it were one of the caves from her stories. At the sound of Ev's voice, their heads whipped around. Belinda's pale, beady eyes flashed in tandem with Nenaril's dark, wide ones. The strange spots of brightness made Ev think of wolves in the night, and she hid her face behind the book she'd forgotten she was supposed to be reading.

"Have you been spying on us?" Belinda demanded.

"I've been listening," Ev admitted. "A little bit. Sometimes. The room's not that big. No matter where I sit, I'm probably going to end up hearing bits of what someone is saying."

"As long as it's not what Nenaril's saying, then I don't care," said Belinda. "She's special. This isn't _for_ you."

"What about you? What makes you so great?" Ev peeked over the edge of her book, intending to glare at Belinda, but thought better of it when she saw Nenaril. The elven girl had retreated back to the far end of the bed and taken Belinda's braid in her hands, clinging to it like a mooring rope.

"I never said I was great!" said Belinda. "Literally no one has ever said I was great! That's not the point!"

"I think you're pretty great," said Nenaril. Belinda wrapped an arm around her shoulders and smiled up at her appreciatively.

"Why?" Ev asked before she could stop herself. Looking at the two of them cuddled together like that made her feel as though she were being hollowed out by something eating her guts from inside.

"It doesn't concern you!" Nenaril told her. "Go sit on some other part of the floor, if you like it so much better down there than on your bed!"

Just at that moment, Ev would have very much liked to retreat to the safe, isolating height of her bunk bed, but that would have meant conceding that she'd only gotten down on the floor to eavesdrop. Instead, she relocated to the furthest corner of the room, pressed her back into the seam where the walls met, and spread her book out in front of her like a third wall to seal herself away.

—

After that, Ev went from finding excuses to be near Nenaril to staying as far away from her as possible. Nenaril, for her part, acted no more or less avoidant than she had before. Ev worried she might be overcompensating and making herself seem even weirder and creepier, but she didn't know what else to do. Whenever she looked at Nenaril, she felt like her insides were getting chewed on again — and she couldn't seem to stop herself from looking whenever Nenaril was in her line of sight.

In the dormitories, it was easy enough to keep her distance, because Ev knew where Nenaril's bed was and could duck around the other rows of bunks surrounding it as she passed by. The library, on the other hand, posed a problem. There was a specific table where Nenaril and Belinda always sat, and they always faced out across the room with their backs to the bookcase just a few feet behind them. When Ev had to get through that part of the library while they were there, she could walk either across their field of view or close enough behind them that reaching out to brush her fingers against Nenaril's hair as she went would be trivial.

Usually, Ev passed in front of them and tried not to look. Sometimes, she passed behind them and tried not to touch. She often failed at not looking, and then she would see one or both of them looking back at her in annoyance, but that wasn't a disaster, even if it sort of felt like one.

She only once failed at not touching.

It was winter. No fires were allowed in the library, so Ev had grabbed a book to take back to the dormitory where she could read in the warmth of her own bed. She hadn't expected anyone would be willing to brave the chill for long enough to sit and study among the stacks, but she found Nenaril and Belinda in their usual spot, their chairs pulled closer than usual and their shoulders pressed together to share heat. Nenaril's hair draped across both of their backs like a winter cloak. It looked warm and soft, and Ev's fingers were cold, and the tresses were so thick that surely Nenaril wouldn't notice if Ev was very, very careful and only stroked them very, very gently.

Nenaril did notice. She stood up and spun around so quickly that her chair toppled over. Belinda started sideways out of her own chair, and Ev jumped backward and threw up her arms to protect herself from the falling furniture. Something shone like crystal in Nenaril's hand as she lunged at Ev, and then there was pain, and the sleeve of Ev's robe hung in tatters, and her arm felt warm and wet.

Ev screamed, and everything stopped. Belinda lay sprawled on the floor. Nenaril stood holding an icicle that glittered diamond-white near its base and vivid garnet-red at its point. Both of them were terrified and still. Only their eyes moved as they looked around to try to piece together what had happened, just as Ev was doing.

"You idiot, you're bleeding," Belinda said finally.

"Sorry," said Ev. "I'll go find Enchanter Lydia."

"What? No! Ev, don't you dare just walk away from—"

"Don't worry about it." Ev was already leaving, so she couldn't see Belinda, but her sharp words prodded at her back like spurs. "It's my fault. I'm really sorry."

—

"How did this happen?" Lydia asked as she held Ev's arm and probed at the stab wound.

"I wasn't using blood magic," said Ev.

"Yes, I am a competent enough healer to have worked that out for myself, thank you. I asked what you _were_ doing, not what you weren't."

"It was an accident," said Ev.

"Evelyn." The Enchanter paused her healing to take Ev's chin in her hand and tilt her head up until they made eye contact.

"It's not a big deal," said Ev. "You can fix it in just a couple minutes, right?"

"Evelyn," Lydia repeated warningly. The bleeding remained stopped even with her magic withdrawn, but the numbing effect began to fade.

"I snuck up on Nenaril and startled her," Ev admitted. "I wanted to touch her hair, and I thought that she wouldn't feel it, but she did and it scared her and... it was ice. Just a little bit of ice, nothing too dangerous. I don't think she really meant it. She didn't know it was me there, didn't even know it was a person and not a demon or something. It was an accident, and it was my fault, and I got hurt enough to learn my lesson, so can you please just heal me and let me go?"

"Oh, Evelyn." Lydia sighed. "That was a very foolish thing to do." She went back to healing as she lectured her, though, so all in all, it wasn't too bad.

—

"What did you tell them?" something hissed in Ev's ear. She knew that she was dreaming, could see the Fade's green sky and the impossible assortment of objects that hung in it like clouds, so she assumed at first that a demon had come upon her. The hands that closed around her shoulders grabbed her from the front, though, and she couldn't see anyone there. When they pulled her forward, gravity shifted around her until she was being pulled upward instead.

Ev awoke in her bunk with Belinda kneeling in front of her, shaking her and breathing in her face as she repeated, "What did you tell them? What did you tell them?" The younger girl's voice was low and trembling, her grip desperately tight. Beneath falling tears, her eyes shone with reflections of what little light seeped into the dormitory from beneath the door to the hall.

"What did I tell whom?"

"The Templars! They took her! We heard them coming and she made me hide under her bed and they took her and I know it was you! It had to be you! No one else was there, and I didn't say anything to anyone!"

"You mean Nenaril?"

Belinda clenched her teeth, and a strange, shrill sound tore its way out from between them. Ev waited, but received no other answer.

"I didn't tell the Templars anything," Ev protested. "I only told Lydia. I said it was an accident, and that it was my fault."

"And she told the Templars! Of course she did! Why would you do that?"

"She asked me what happened when I went for healing. I tried to be vague, but she wouldn't let me."

"Then you should have lied!"

"I'm no good at lying!"

"Because you don't have to be! Because you can just make the rest of us pay for it!" Belinda's fingers grew hot. Ev smelled her robes beginning to singe, and pressed her own hands over Belinda's to quench the flames with cold magic. Belinda didn't struggle, so Ev figured she must not have meant to burn her.

"I'm sorry," Ev said. "I know it isn't enough just to be sorry, but I am. It won't happen again, and I'll do anything you want to make it up. Anything either of you want."

"Shut up! Don't talk like it's going to be okay! It won't ever be okay!"

"It probably will be, though," Ev reassured her. "It's not like when the older apprentices are led off to the Harrowing. I used to get taken down to the dungeons all the time, and I always came back."

"And now you're like this! You used to be brave, and now, instead, you're this!"

"I wasn't brave. I was stupid and immature."

"You were clever and fun and I loved you!"

"Really?" That was news to Ev. "You never even talked to me."

"I didn't have to! Just seeing you run out into the rain, or hearing you take apart their stupid lectures... And now that's gone. What did they do to you? What are they going to do to her?"

"You've got the wrong idea." Ev moved her icy fingertips up to her own neck, where her skin was bare and the cold stung properly. "No one did anything bad. It was just... something finally clicked for me, and I grew up a little. I haven't had to go back since. That's a good thing."

"Oh, but you don't tell lies!" Belinda sobbed, or maybe laughed. "Not to the people who matter, anyway!"

"I'm not lying! You don't understand. If you really thought I was brave and the way I used to behave was fun, then of course you wouldn't understand. I didn't want to be like that, I just wasn't in control of myself. And anyway, Nenaril isn't the same as I was, and this is her first time down there, so she's going to be fine."

"I know she isn't like you! That's why she's _not_ going to be fine!" Belinda definitely sobbed, then. She collapsed against Ev's chest, and muffled her wails in the fabric of Ev's robes, and clung to her so tightly that Ev couldn't tell whether she meant to hug her or crush the life out of her. Ev got the impression that if she tried to pull away, Belinda would just squeeze harder, so instead she tried not to move.

The two of them sat up together for the rest of the night. When morning came, Nenaril was still gone.

—

"Pauline!" Ev called out to the first pair of helmeted Templars she met in hall. "Is Pauline around? Please, I need to see her!"

"Really? Again?" one of them asked. "I thought we were done with this."

"I don't care! Drag me to the dungeons if you want, just tell her I've been sent there! I have to talk to her _now_!"

"Maker's breath." A sigh reverberated behind the metal. "All right, if it will stop you from running down the halls screaming bloody murder, I'll go get her. Just stay put and be silent. Perry, keep an eye her, would you?" He trudged off, moving far too slowly in his clanking armor for Ev's nerves to bear it. She rocked on her heels and clawed at her arms while the Templar who'd remained behind glared at her from behind his visor.

Some long minutes later, Pauline appeared, carrying her helmet under one arm. Ev, unable to restrain herself a moment longer, rushed forward to meet her at the far end of the hall. "Pauline, you have to help Nenaril! They took her away, and I think it's my fault, but she didn't mean to hurt me! I hurt her first! You can't blame her for that!"

"Ev, calm down," Pauline said, laying a hand on her shoulder. "I can't follow what you're saying when you're like this."

"You don't have to follow! Just help me get Nenaril back now, and I'll explain everything later!"

"I think Enchanter Lydia already explained enough."

"No, she didn't! I told her it was an accident! I told her it was my fault!"

"But was it really just this one thing?" Pauline asked gently. "You've been walking on eggshells around that girl for months."

"That was my fault too! It's complicated and embarrassing and I don't have time to explain, but please, please believe me! Nenaril never hurt me before yesterday, and she didn't even mean to hurt me then! We have to go get her back right now!"

"Ev..." Pauline set her helmet down on the floor so that she could take both of Ev's hands in her own. "I'm sorry, but it's too late."

"No!" Ev recoiled, but Pauline was prepared for that and kept a firm hold on her. "What do you mean too late? What happened?"

"I... don't know, exactly. I wasn't there."

"Wasn't there for what?"

"For the... like I said, I don't know. If she reacted to them like she did to you, they were probably just defending themselves."

"No! Who? They weren't! There's no way she could have really hurt them, not with the armor and the lyrium and—" And Ev found herself hoping that Nenaril had managed to hurt them anyway, before they got her. Ev wanted to hurt them. "Pauline, who was it?"

"That doesn't matter. Ev, you need to calm down. You're drawing attention with all this yelling."

"I don't care! Drag me away and lock me up, I don't care! I just..! I have to..!" She had to do _something_ , even if she couldn't think what. Nenaril was dead, and it was her fault. If there was nothing else left, then she simply had to pay.

"Ev, listen to me." Pauline pulled her into an embrace, holding Ev secure against her armor in spite of her half-hearted struggling. "There is nothing we can do. There is nothing we could have done. It's too late, and it might always have been too late. You must have seen what she was like from the moment she arrived here. Sometimes that's just how it is for mages who've gone too long without proper guidance. There's a term for it and everything: arcane derangement. There's books on it, all precise and technical, just the way you like your explanations. I can go pull one for you, if that would help you make sense of it. All right? Are you a little calmer now?"

Ev had gone limp in Pauline's grasp. Once she'd no longer needed to hold herself up, she'd started crying too hard to stand, almost too hard to even breathe.

"You're okay," Pauline continued. "Just take the day off and rest. I'll handle explaining it to anyone who thinks you shouldn't. You'll be okay."

"I know!" Ev sobbed out. "Of course I'll be okay!"

That was the worst part, because Nenaril never would be.

—

Ev spent the rest of the day curled up in her blankets, crying herself parched and then slipping out for water in the lulls between her fits so that she could keep crying when she returned. Around lunchtime, a Tranquil came in to strip Nenaril's bed and nearly tripped over Belinda as she darted out from her hiding place beneath it.

"I'm sorry," Ev blurted out as the younger apprentice clambered up the ladder to meet her in her bunk. "You were right. It wasn't fine. I was so stupid."

Belinda slapped her.

"I'm sorry!" Ev repeated.

"Kill me too!" Belinda slapped her again. "How hard do I have to hit you before you kill me too?"

"I'm the one who should be dead! I think I might be deranged. I think maybe I wasn't being guided properly when I first got here. Maybe the intervention was too little too late and the magic did something to my mind that I can't come back from."

"I hate you! I won't ever forgive you! Why don't you just kill me so I don't have to look at you anymore?"

"There's something really wrong with me! Normal people don't go around touching people's hair even when they know they shouldn't!"

"Yes they do! Normal people do all sorts of things! That's why it was bad!" Belinda grabbed Ev's shoulders and shook her like she'd done to wake her up the night before. "This is the world you live in, princess!"

"I'm not a princess!" _I'm the knight,_ she wanted to say, but she had never truly been one of those and probably never would be. _I'm just a minor lady_ , she almost said, but she hadn't been one of those since the lightning answered her call. "I'm a witch."

"No! _I'm_ a witch! You're their pet!" Belinda screamed at her. "That's what rich people call their stupid, yappy little dogs! Here, princess! Be a good girl, princess!"

"Fine, then I'm a dog _and_ a witch! I'm an abomination! I'm a robe!"

"I hate you!"

"I hate me too!"

"Why are you like this?!"

"Because I'm a robe!" Saying that word hurt just right, like pressing cold or lightning against her skin. It didn't sound grandiose, because Ev wasn't anyone grand, not even in a bad way. She wasn't anyone at all. She was a strange, delicate, useless _thing_. "I'm a fucking robe!"

"I give up!" Belinda yelled, and jumped off the bed so carelessly that she swore in pain when she hit the floor.


	9. Back Where You Belong

Ev got back to her room, peeled off her shoes, and washed her face. She'd wiped away all the cosmetic gunk before the carriage ride back to the Circle, but the skin it had covered for so long still itched. She heated the water basin with her hands until it almost boiled and scrubbed her face raw with the coarse washrag, but it did little to make her feel like herself again.

She nearly tore her dress fumbling with the laces in the back where her hands could barely reach, but she managed to get herself out of it and into her robes without Pauline's aid. Then she flopped on the bed. She'd already slept some in one of the villa's guest rooms, and then again in the carriage, but she had no idea what to do with herself except try to be unconscious for as long as possible.

She was never getting out. Pauline kept insisting that they would find a way, and Ev knew better than to argue with her, but she also knew that she needed to resign herself for her own peace of mind.

It wouldn't be so bad, probably. Life in the mages' wing didn't come with the same underlying urgency and anxiety that life as an apprentice had, not as long as you stayed out of politics and didn't get any big ideas about personal advancement. Ev could learn to be content with a sedentary existence spent tending the garden and reading her books.

And if Ser Martin's faction — Lord Seeker Lucius' faction, really — got its way in Ostwick? Well, Ev couldn't stop that from happening by worrying about it. Besides, if it did happen, would she even want to be on the outside of it? To be in some noble's court and hear the news and have to somehow not break down crying and retching in front of everyone? No, if it came to that, she would rather be where her part in it all would be over with quickly.

Unconsciousness did not seem to be forthcoming, so Ev decided to read. It was the same effect, essentially: sending her mind elsewhere. Reading accomplished that a bit less literally, though, and was therefore a bit less dangerous.

Then again, maybe the level of danger depended on the book. What Ev really wanted to do, she decided, was dig out _Tale of the Champion_ and reread all of the parts about Hawke and Anders and Merrill tearing people apart with magic. That certainly wasn't a safe thing for someone like her to feel, but she indulged the feeling anyway.

Ev went to her dresser. She kept _Tale of the Champion_ in the middle of the stack of books shoved into a corner where her spare robes draped over and concealed them. She had removed the damning cover, burned it, and replaced it with the cover of a history book she had bought before realizing just how obnoxious of a read it would be, the insides of which she had likewise burned. If she were to be honest with herself, she would have to admit that the level of precaution she had taken verged on paranoia, which made it all the more of a shock when she pushed her spare robes out of the way to find that the stack behind them was short one book.

Pulling the stack apart confirmed that it was exactly the book she'd feared. The two authentic lives of the Divines were right where they ought to be, but the more modern biography wearing the skin of _A Commoner on the Sunburst Throne: The Ascent and Reign of Galatea I_ had been snatched out from between them.

"No, no, no, I'm too tired for this!" Ev all but wailed — then stuffed her hand into her mouth and bit down on her fingers until tears pricked at the corners of her eyes, because talking to herself loudly enough to be overheard was the stupidest thing she could possibly do.

She needed to stay calm. Maybe she had misplaced it herself? Unlikely, since even aside from how careful she was with _Tale of the Champion_ specifically, Ev had been trying to keep everything in her room neatly organized and always in its place, as a way of grounding herself in reality.

Oh, right: grounding. This was a cue to run through the list. Ev closed her eyes and opened them without anything strange happening. She went to the window and looked up into the blue sky above the courtyard. Before the fortress she'd been in a carriage, and before the carriage she'd been at her family's country villa. Trying to recall the precise sequence of events turned up some blank spaces, which was less than damningly suspicious given how much of that time she'd spent distressed and slipping in and out of consciousness, but she had already found one thing out of place, and really she would like very much for this to be a nightmare, so Ev tried shocking herself just to be safe.

Nothing happened, except that now her arm hurt.

Ev tore the covers off of her mattress and shook them out. She pulled her clothes and her books out of the dresser and ran her hands along its inner walls as though she would uncover some geometrically implausible cranny that _Tale of the Champion_ could have fallen into. She looked under her bed, on the shelf with all the soap, and inside the washtub. Then she did it again, and then again a third time, and made it halfway through a fourth cycle before sinking to her knees and crying, because the space she had to live in was small and empty and all too easily searched, and if she hadn't found the book yet that meant that it was gone, and if it was gone that meant that someone had taken it, and if someone had taken it that meant...

What did it mean? Was she going to die? Pauline wouldn't let that happen. Pauline had gotten her out of worse. But Pauline would be angry that Ev had done something so stupid behind her back and then lied to her about it repeatedly. Would she be less angry if Ev came clean to her now, rather than waiting for things to get worse? Probably not, since Ev could hardly claim to be acting out of anything like genuine remorse. What would she even say?

_Hi, cuz, I did something really bad, sorry about that, and by the way I need your help! It's just like old times, except that I'm no longer a child and you were probably hoping I knew better now! That sure was a silly thing to hope, especially after the scar and the party and all of the other evidence that I'm still the same disappointing waste of space I always have been, and I probably always will be!_

Ev's stomach lurched. She was so ill-fed her whole body spasmed with it. She'd gotten blackberry bile stains on a rug in one of the villa's backrooms earlier, and hadn't risked eating anything else since. She really needed to eat, but instead she just cried until she was parched as well as hungry. Even if mealtimes were a bit more flexible in this wing of the fortress, surely there wouldn't be anyone in the kitchen this late at night. Besides, she wouldn't want anyone to see her like this even if being seen _could_ get her food. There was nothing to be done but wait out the hunger until breakfast, like there was nothing to be done but wait out the fear until whoever had found her book came forward to accuse her.

Ev put her room back in order and then crawled into bed. She didn't sleep well that night, but at least she didn't throw up again, either.

—

The next day, Ev only left her room twice, slinking out to grab food from the kitchen and then scurrying back like a rat to its den. She slept as much as possible. When she couldn't sleep, she read. When she couldn't read, she stared blankly at the pages through the blurring of her eyes and tried not to let her thoughts get too far ahead of her or her sobs get too loud. She tensed every time she heard armored footsteps in the hall outside, but they always passed her by.

The day after, the footsteps finally stopped in front of her room. Ev wrapped her blanket a little more tightly around herself as the knob turned and the door creaked open, but then it was just Pauline standing in the doorway. "Hey, Ev. You feeling any better yet?" she asked.

"Yes," Ev lied. "I'm sorry about the tantrum."

"It's okay," Pauline lied back. She'd made it perfectly clear a couple days ago that it wasn't okay at all. "I'm sorry too. I should have done a lot more to help you prepare."

"No, you're fine," said Ev. "It was my fault." It wasn't, entirely, but the problem with the book was. Since that would explode in both their faces soon enough, Ev didn't want to take advantage of Pauline's contrition.

"Well, whoever's fault it was, we're both going to do better next time," Pauline told her. "I've been looking into the possibility of getting you an etiquette tutor. There used to be people willing to come to the Circle as long as the money was good enough, but that's gotten a bit trickier since... well, you know. We could have lessons at your parents' place, but they would probably only be once a month, maybe twice if I really push for it. While I work that out, though, I was thinking that the two of us could practice talking. Like you would to a normal person, I mean. Just a quick chat every day or two, so you don't get rusty sitting cooped up in your room and only ever conversing with other mages when you do step out. Would you like that?"

"Sounds good," Ev said, since she couldn't see any way out of it.

Pauline stepped further into the room and had Ev stand up to face her instead of lounging on the bed. The next hour or so passed in trivial conversation about weather and food and the history book Ev had been reading. Pauline periodically reminded Ev to look her in the eyes, which Ev found difficult enough to do consistently even when she _wasn't_ guiltily keeping a secret from her cousin. On the one occasion that she forgot herself enough to laugh, Pauline let her know that she sounded too loud and wild, and had her practice laughing more appropriately.

By the time Pauline had to leave, she wore an optimistic smile and was happy enough with Ev to offer her a quick hug on the way out the door. To Ev, that just made things worse. Pauline tried so hard for her, and it could all be for nothing in the end, because even if she wasn't punished too severely for having smuggled contraband into the Circle, she might never be allowed back out to where she'd smuggled it from.

—

On the third day, Ev grew restless. Why wasn't whoever had confiscated her book doing anything about it? Were they trying to drive her paranoid? If so, it was working.

She tore apart her own room in one more desperate search, hoping beyond hope that this terror had just been a silly mistake on her part after all. When that yet again failed to turn up anything, she stormed out to the courtyard to pace around the perimeter. Maybe the air and change of scenery would clear her head. If not, maybe she could at least work off some nervous energy.

Caught up in her own thoughts as she was, Ev went a few laps without noticing Belinda sitting against the garden wall and reading in the sunlight. She only finally did notice because Belinda stretched out a leg and tripped her.

"What is your problem?" Ev demanded once she'd caught her balance.

"Hello, Ev!" said Belinda. "I missed you, too! It's been ages!"

"And yet, not nearly long enough."

"Oh, stop whining. You'll be rid of me for good in a year or so, if not sooner. For now, let's catch up. I found the most _fascinating_ book. Have you ever read it?" With a manic grin on her face, she held it up so that Ev could clearly see the cover — the very, _very_ familiar cover.

"Seriously?" Ev asked. She didn't know whether she was addressing Belinda, or just the world at large.

"I'm always serious," said Belinda, giggling.

"And what exactly do you find so interesting about Galatea I?"

"Well, from what I understand," said Belinda, "she was a commoner on the Sunburst Throne."

"And?"

"And, apparently, she ascended and also reigned."

" _And_ she's the one who decided that the Templar Order should have the Right of Annulment," Ev informed her. "I don't know why I hoped anyone would write a thoughtful, measured account of that decision instead of shoveling on the mindless adulation."

"Wait, really?" asked Belinda. "You're not just trying to catch me out?"

"Yes, really. Why would I bother with tricks like that when you already want to be caught?"

"Oh, well done!" Belinda's grin somehow got even wider. "Seriously, I'm impressed! I hope you had fun shredding that thing."

"Thank you. Now give me back my book."

"Make me," said Belinda. "Oh, wait: you can't. Not without risking your own neck, anyway."

"What about your neck?" Ev fought to keep her voice low in spite of her agitation. "Even if I don't say anything, you could still get caught, and then it will be all on you."

"Right?" Belinda agreed cheerfully. "They'll have no idea how I managed it! Maybe they'll beat me before they kill me, to try to find out, but even if I tell them the truth, they won't believe it! And then I'll die because of something I did instead of something I couldn't do, and it will be a big, stupid deal, and people might even notice!"

"Don't shout that sort of thing," Ev pleaded. "Are you crazy?"

"I'm not shouting! I'm just not whispering like you are!"

"Fine. Don't _exclaim_ that sort of thing."

"I won't have anyone to exclaim at if you walk away and leave me with my book!"

"It is not your fucking book!" Ev snapped, and lunged forward to grab it from Belinda.

Belinda shrieked with laughter and held fast, refusing to let go even when Ev pulled so hard she risked tearing apart the binding. Ev shocked her hands, and the book slipped through Belinda's convulsing fingers, but before Ev could turn and walk off with it, Belinda threw her arms around it and drew it back to her chest, latching on with her whole body. Ev's mana flared. Belinda shrieked again, and the strands of her hair that had come loose from her braid floated out around her head in a cloud of static, but she didn't stop grinning and she didn't back off.

Ev barely registered the clatter of armor in motion coming from behind her until a gauntleted hand pressed flat between the blades of her shoulders, cold and hard even with her robes to separate the metal from her skin. Her mana went up in flame, burning through every inch of her for one agonizing moment and then simply ceasing to be, leaving her hollow and unable to hold up her own weight. She crumpled to the ground, and Belinda fell with her.

"Evelyn? Evelyn, what happened?" she heard Lydia saying once her ears stopped ringing, and looked up to see the Senior Enchanter slipping between a pair of helmeted Templars to kneel down beside her and Belinda. "This isn't like you."

"Um..." Ev looked up at the Templars.

"May I please have a little space?" Lydia asked them. "For triage."

One of the Templars took a single step backward. The other followed their lead. Lydia frowned, but turned her attention to Ev, her magic-lit hands searching out and smoothing over the scrapes and bruises she'd gotten when she'd hit the ground. "Take your time, Evelyn. It's normal to be disoriented."

"I took her book, so she attacked me," Belinda volunteered without a trace of remorse in her voice.

"It isn't _my_ book, exactly," Ev said quickly. "I borrowed it from the library, and Belinda snatched it away to tease me, but it isn't as though she stole from me. I overreacted, and we both paid for it, and I'm sorry. You can let her keep it, or take it away from both of us and put it back on the shelves, or whatever you think is best."

"I see," said Lydia. She let go of Ev, and moved on to Belinda.

One of the Templars stepped forward again and leaned over Ev to retrieve her book from where it had fallen. " _A Commoner on the Sunburst Throne_ ," he read from the cover as he straightened back up.

The voice was Ser Martin's.

"All this over a history on Divine Galatea?" he asked.

"Well, not really," said Ev. "The book itself was more just a game piece in an ongoing feud. Belinda and I have been bickering for years."

"All too true," Lydia cut in before Ser Martin could get out a full syllable of his next question. "I doubt that anyone even remembers what started it, at this point, but it _will_ end now that they've both seen how foolish it truly is for grown mages to carry on this way. Won't it, Evelyn? Belinda?"

"Yes, Senior Enchanter," they chorused like young apprentices at their lessons.

"Hm," Ser Martin grumbled, and for one last happy moment it seemed to Ev as though her luck might still be holding. Then he cracked open the book and began to flip through the pages. "'The elf drew the knife across her hand,'" he read, "'and a thick red mist rose up around her and ate through the magical barrier like acid through metal.'"

"That's an account of an event that occurred, lacking in any sort of detail that could be used to replicate it," Lydia said. "Hardly the same thing as a manual."

"'That was a summoning,'" Ser Martin continued reading. "'That takes blood magic.'" He stopped abruptly, laughed aloud in amazement, then closed the book around his thumb to look straight at Ev as he concluded, "' _Anders_ said, rather unnecessarily.' The life of Divine Galatea, was it? Are you sure about that?"

"Lydia," Ev pleaded, taking hold of the older mage's sleeve.

"Oh, Evelyn." Lydia stood up and backed away quickly. "What did you do?"

"Nothing!" Belinda burst out. "Ev didn't do anything! It was me! I lied about it being her book! She was trying to get rid of it before it got _everyone_ in trouble, but I didn't want to give it up!"

"Belinda, no, that doesn't even make any sense!" Ev told her. "Where would you have gotten ahold of a banned book, let alone the time and space to rebind it without anyone noticing?" She pushed herself to her feet and tried her best to look Ser Martin in the face, though her eyes kept wavering down toward the ground, or off to one side over his shoulder. "I'm the one who's been out on leave. Pauline bought me the book about Galatea, and I grabbed _Tale of the Champion_ when she wasn't looking, and then I switched them when I was alone in my quarters. It's Belinda who was trying to get rid of it! She... she knew how much worse people without good families would get it, if anything went bad."

"That makes even less sense! People besides you saw me out here reading it, genius! And anyway, I _did_ get it into the Circle myself, but I am never, ever telling how!"

"What does that make, then? Three different stories in as many minutes?" Ser Martin passed the book off to the other Templar, then took hold of Ev's wrist and pulled her close. With his free hand, he cupped her chin and forced her head up until she was staring into the shadows beneath his visor. "I wonder how many more I'll have to wring out of you before we reach the truth."

"No." Ev's legs felt so weak, all that kept her standing was the fear of how much more his grip would hurt if it were the only thing left holding her up. "Please, no. You don't have to do this. I can... I'll..." What? What could she do to get him to take his hands off of her? There had to be _something_.

"Hush, now." The hand on her face tightened, clamping her jaw shut. "Save your voice. You'll be screaming soon enough."

"Shall I inform the First Enchanter that you are transferring these two downstairs?" Lydia asked.

"Oh, yes, by all means," said Ser Martin. "Go run and tell Sofia, and Trevelyan, and whoever else you would like to have in on the argument I know perfectly well is about to happen. I don't intend to do anything behind anyone's back. When all's said and done, I won't have to."

Lydia did not run, but rather strode off briskly as Ser Martin dragged Ev away, and his colleague hauled Belinda to her feet to pull her after them. Ev kept her eyes on the Senior Enchanter for as long as she could, but Lydia did not look back at her even once.


	10. A Thing That Happened When Ev Was Ten

Would it be hanged or hung if it was by the wrists? The Hanged Man on the card was hanged by the ankle, but Ev got the impression that was still a form of execution, so maybe that made the difference. She doubted that anything done with the chains she saw in the dungeons was done to the death, unless they were part of that Harrowing thing she kept hearing brought up as the probable reason for most disappearances. But if what mattered was that it was a punishment — or even just that it was done to a person and not, say, wet laundry — then she supposed it could still be hanged.

It was a stupid question, and Ev knew it. Ev knew that she asked lots of stupid questions, but that didn't mean that all of her questions were stupid, and if Chantry sisters were so smart then they ought to be able to tell the difference.

 _Why does "magic" mean "mages"?_ was not a stupid question. If that line of Transfigurations mattered so much, then how the sisters knew that it meant what they said it meant also mattered.

"Magic comes from mages," Sister Thomasina had answered impatiently, like that was relevant or even accurate.

"No, it doesn't," Ev had reminded her. "It comes from the Fade."

"You know what I mean."

"No, I don't. That's why I'm asking."

"What you're asking makes no sense."

"It will make sense if you just listen! 'Magic was made to serve man and never to rule over him.' Why does 'magic' mean 'mages'? Why doesn't 'man' mean 'mages'? Why isn't it an option to just use magic to serve ourselves as long as we aren't harming or trying to rule over anyone else?"

"Because that simply isn't how it works. Mages serving themselves always does cause harm. You have only to look at Tevinter, in Andraste's time or in our own, to see where that path leads."

Looking back from the vantage point of her dungeon cell, Ev could grudgingly see how maybe she should have accepted that answer. It was a clear enough explanation for why the Chantry said the things it did. Ev had been thinking about the Chant itself when the weirdness of the wording had first stuck out to her, though, and the Chant itself was what she'd wanted to understand when she'd asked Sister Thomasina to explain.

"But is that really what Andraste said?" she'd stubbornly pressed on. "Is there some translation thing I don't get, or is it just how the Chantry these days interprets it?"

At that, Sister Thomasina's clearly frayed patience had snapped almost audibly. "Oh, yes, mageling, you are so much more clever than 'the Chantry these days'!" she had all but spat. "You know so much better than us grown women who've devoted our whole lives to the Maker and His bride!"

"I don't!" Ev had snapped back. "I never said that I do! That's why I'm asking you to answer my questions!" Though she hadn't noticed it before, Ev had been wringing her hands in agitation for most of the argument. She'd thrown them up in frustration, then, and a shower of sparks had rained down on her own head, flashing and crackling angrily. Sister Thomasina had jolted back from her in alarm and bashed her shoulder against the lectern, then shouted in pain and terror until the Templars had come to drag Ev away.

Now she sat in a cell, hugging her knees to her chin and attempting to calm herself down enough that when the Templars came to fetch her, she could apologize and go back upstairs without exploding again. Unfortunately, no matter what distractions she tried to bury her anger beneath, her mind kept drifting back to how unfair the whole thing was.

After some hours, a Templar opened the door to her cell and asked her whether she was ready to behave.

"No, I don't know that I am," Ev admitted.

The Templar stared at her wordlessly.

"Oh, was that a rhetorical question?" Ev asked. "Sorry for answering it, then."

The Templar closed and relocked the door and walked away.

Another few hours passed. The next Templar to show up was Pauline. She'd taken her helmet off, so Ev knew it was her even before she spoke. But when Ev sat up a little straighter and smiled in greeting, Pauline did not smile back. "You're getting too old for this," she said.

"Too old for asking questions?"

Pauline's frown deepened into a scowl. "That is _not_ all you did, and you know it!"

"I know the lightning was bad, and I'm sorry, but Sister Thomasina was mad at me even before that! She got mad at me just for asking questions, and I got mad back, and that's _why_ the lightning happened!"

"She wasn't mad at you for asking questions, she was mad at you for being so snotty about it!"

"I wasn't being—"

"Yes, you were! Listen to yourself, Ev! You're still doing it! Do you know why I'm down here? Because the last person who came to get you out told me that you made him want to punch you, and that if you talked back to him one more time, he would."

"I wasn't talking back! It was a misunderstanding, and I apologized!"

"You 'apologized' sarcastically!"

"What? No, I didn't!"

"Well it sure sounded that way to him! I know you usually mean well, but that isn't enough on its own. You have to try harder."

"I want to!" Ev could hear her own voice cracking pitifully, and she hated it. Her words always found some way of coming out wrong. When she didn't sound snotty or sarcastic or overly intense, she just sounded weak. "I want to, but I don't know how."

"And I don't know how to help you." The aggression drained from Pauline's posture, leaving her slumped and slack. Pauline never really looked small, because she was an adult and because Ev only ever saw her in heavy armor, but for the moment she towered a little bit less than usual. "Tell me what you need from me, Ev."

"I need to get out of here." She knew as she said it that it was a bad thing to say, but Pauline was asking her, and she didn't have any other answers. "I hate the Circle. I hate how the Chantry sisters talk down to me, and how the Templars always make assumptions that I have to answer for even if they aren't true, and how the only time I get any space or quiet from other apprentices is when I'm down here."

"You know there's nothing I can do about that. There isn't anywhere else you can go. You have to learn how to live here, or you won't be able to live anywhere at all."

Of course. Ev did know that. Why had she even tried asking for what she knew she'd never get? Why did she ever try anything at all? "I guess I'll just die, then," she muttered.

"That isn't a joke, Ev! Maker's breath, do you really not understand how serious this is? Is that the problem? Maybe that's my fault. Maybe I should just let you get yourself hit so you can learn from it."

"Maybe you should!" Ev's heart sped up until she thought her chest might burst, though she couldn't tell whether it was more from fear or from anger, or whether it was Pauline or herself that she was most angry at. "Maybe you should hit me! Maybe you should hang me up and whip me!" At least that would be something new, something different from this tired out argument and the directionless rage and formless dread that always came with it.

"Do you think that someone won't, if you keep up like this? Is that really what you want, Ev? You keep saying you want to be a Knight-Enchanter. Do you think Knight-Enchanters have stripes on their backs? Or arcane advisors, or anyone else who gets to live outside the Circle? I can talk you up all I like, but when people see the marks, they're going to want to know what you did to get them. You could ruin your whole life if you don't stop before it comes to that."

"Well, I can't stop, so maybe you should just kill me and get it over with!"

Pauline clenched her fists and threw her head back like she was about to scream in frustration, but instead squeezed her eyes shut and took a deep breath in and out. When she opened her eyes again, there was a strange emptiness to them, and she fixed Ev with a dispassionate stare. "All right," she said simply.

A sudden chill doused the heat of Ev's anger, but the hammering of her heart didn't slow. "'All right'? What do you mean, 'all right'?"

"All right, you win. Give up and die, if that's what you want. I'm done." Then she turned and walked away.

"Pauline, wait, I'm sorry!" Ev jerked forward and gripped the bars of her cell, feeling pathetic as she did it, but also too frightened to care. "I didn't mean it! Come back, please! I'm ready to behave. I'll go back upstairs. I won't say anything to anyone — I mean, I'll apologize to Sister Thomasina, if you want me to, but I won't ask any more questions, or..."

But Pauline didn't look back, didn't stop walking or even slow down. She just held up a hand to wave dismissively behind her, right before she disappeared around a corner. Then she was gone, and Ev was alone again.

Ev dissolved into tears. It was stupid, she knew, because Pauline was probably just trying to scare her, and she shouldn't let it work.

Or maybe she should let it work. Maybe if she cried and screamed and let herself believe the threat, maybe if she felt everything that Pauline wanted her to feel, then Pauline would come back and tell her that it was enough.

Pauline didn't come back. Ev sobbed until she had emptied herself of sounds and tears, then lay down on the floor and willed herself to stay calm and not let fear or anger fill her back up. She was thirsty. Her face was wet, and her throat was dry. She was a little bit hungry, too, and would probably be even hungrier if she weren't too thirsty to notice. She must have missed at least one meal by now, and she didn't want to miss any more. The next time someone came for her, she would be good. She wouldn't talk at all, just nod or shake her head if called on to answer questions. Even she couldn't somehow manage to nod offensively.

Ev was not going to give up and die. She was going to grow up and be a Knight-Enchanter, because that was a real thing that she could be even if she was a mage and couldn't be a Templar. She didn't really want to be a Templar anymore, anyway, because she didn't want to fight mages now that she knew what mages really were, except maybe Vints. She could still fight Vints as a Knight-Enchanter, if the Divine decided to march on them. She could fight darkspawn if there was another Blight, or giants if they attacked the Marches again — or maybe even if they didn't, maybe the Marches would attack them first, and she could raid the dungeons where they kept the people they were trying to torture into conversion, and cut through the bars with a sword made of raw magic power that she wielded as easily as an extension of her own arm. The giants would be bigger than her even once she was an adult, like the Templars were bigger than her now, but she would be strong enough by then to cut them down anyway if they tried to stop her from freeing everyone. That was one of Ev's favorite things to think about, so she thought about it until she fell asleep.

The clank of metal footsteps woke her up. This Templar had their helmet on, but Ev still pulled herself up off the floor and onto her knees and smiled at them politely as they unlocked the door to her cell. "Pauline?" she asked hopefully. "I really am sorry."

"I'm not your damn cousin," the Templar said, and Ev flinched at his voice, because he sounded like he might be the same one who'd said he wanted to hit her. He stepped into her cell and grabbed her by the wrist, then yanked her onto her feet and out through the door.

Ev stumbled and nearly fell trying to keep up with the length of his stride as he pulled her along behind him. It did not help that her head was clouded and dizzy and her legs weak and shaking from hunger. "Thank you for the hand up, but I can follow you without you touching me," she told him.

The Templar did not let go of her, but he did stop walking. Ev stopped walking too, and was grateful for the chance to catch her breath, right up until he spun around and struck her across the face.

She did fall, then. He hadn't punched her hard enough to knock her down, probably, but her legs gave out beneath her at the sheer shock of it. She didn't hit the floor, because before that happened, her shoulder jerked painfully and she found herself hanging by his hold around her wrist. Then, without a word to her, he started walking again, and it was all Ev could do to get her feet beneath her to keep from being dragged.

When they left the corridor with all the cages, they turned the wrong way. Ev had been up and down the stairs to the dungeons often enough to know their location, and the Templar was taking her in the opposite direction, deeper into the darkness where she had never gone before. _Why?_ she wanted to ask, but she was breathless from keeping pace with him and could not bring herself to struggle through that breathlessness to speak. If she did, he might hit her again.

The room he eventually led her to looked a lot like the infirmary upstairs, only smaller. The multiple glowstones that lit it up as clear as daylight revealed a cot with clean sheets, and shelves of medical supplies, and a washtub without a screen in front of it — and Enchanter Lydia, who stood filling the washtub by dumping a collection of pitchers into it one by one.

"Lydia!" Ev gasped out in delighted relief. "I'm really sorry! Can you tell Pauline that I'm sorry?"

Lydia turned away from her chore, and her brow knit with concern when she saw Ev. "Evelyn, what did you do to your face?" She approached with her hand outstretched and wreathed in a glow of healing magic.

The Templar caught her by the wrist, snuffing out the spirit-light. "Don't waste your energy. We're about to kill her, remember?"

"What?" Electricity jolted up Ev's spine and arced across her limbs. The Templar yelped and released her when it shocked him. Ev stumbled toward Lydia, desperate to hide herself in the Enchanter's arms or behind her back. "Lydia, what's going—?"

It struck her between the shoulders. Not a metal fist this time, but a blast of heat with all the force of one. The ground fell out from under her feet, then she was in the air, then she was lying on her stomach on the floor, and the only connecting thread was the fire that burned out her core and left her shaking and empty.

The Templar kneeled over her and held her down, pulling her hands behind her back. "Lydia, help me!" she screamed as soon as the fire left her lungs. "Get Pauline! I need Pauline, please!"

"Let's just get this over with," Lydia muttered darkly. From the corner of her eye, Ev saw her grab something from a shelf. Then she kneeled down too, and Ev felt something wrap around her wrists and pull tight.

Bandages. Lydia was binding her hands together. She was helping _him_.

"Pauline!" Ev shouted again. What were the chances her cousin was close enough to hear her? Not good at all, but she had to try. She would _not_ just give up and die. "Pauline! Pauline, someone, help, please, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it, not any of it!"

"Give it up, mageling," The Templar let go of her arms once they were restrained, and resettled his grip on her hair and the back of her neck. Pain shot through her scalp as he dragged her over to the washtub and pulled her up onto her knees. "This was Ser Trevelyan's idea in the first place."

The words registered just a little too late for Ev to stop screaming and close her mouth before he plunged her head beneath the water.

It burned. Water shouldn't burn. Cold and smooth against her skin, but tearing and burning in her throat, ravaging like fire, like the smite. The rim of the washtub dug into her ribs, her chest, forcing air out as water forced its way in. She screamed without sound and struggled without hope and her mind burned like her lungs until gradually it sputtered, doused and dying.

Darkness. Light. Ev coughed, and everything still burned, and no amount of coughing stopped the burning, and the sudden air couldn't get in because she kept coughing out water that didn't exist. Her cheek lay in a puddle that reeked of bile. When she tried to push herself off the floor, her wrists hurt and her arms wouldn't move. The Templar grabbed her hair, though she hadn't noticed that he'd ever let go, because her hair had already felt like it was being pulled. She was still coughing when the water closed around her again, and she realized the shadow of pain that had choked her as she'd lain on the ground was nothing compared to what it really felt like to drown.

Darkness. Light. Uncontrollable retching and a wet stone floor crushing against the swollen side of her face and a foul, sour smell. Then the metal hands and the burning water and pain in her throat lungs gut ribs scalp wrists _everywhere_.

Darkness. Light. Was any of this real? Wasn't she already dead? She could swear that she remembered dying. Maybe the Void was just a damned soul's death on endless repeat, like what happened to spirits who crossed over where the Veil was thin.

The next hands to touch her were warm skin instead of metal.

"That's enough," Lydia said. "It was enough the first time. Ser Trevelyan said nothing about doing it more than once."

"Right," said the Templar. "Which means she didn't say not to. Just wait, tomorrow it's going to be back to, 'Oh, how _dare_ you try to discipline my precious spoiled brat, don't you know who our family is?' I had to make the most of it."

"Well, you have. This is the most."

Cold against her wrists, and then the pressure was gone and her arms fell against the floor, heavy and prickling and dead.

"I don't suppose you need me for this part?" the Templar asked.

"No. You're done. If you would like to help, you can inform Ser Trevelyan that we've finished."

Heavy footsteps, fading away, and then he was gone. That was nice, Ev supposed. She no longer understood what was happening here, but at least it wasn't anything that involved him.

Lydia's hands undid the clasps on the back of Ev's robes. She stripped her, then picked her up and carried her to the cot. That made sense. The robes were soaked through with water and streaked with vomit, and the cot's sheets were warm and dry and clean-smelling. Ev wouldn't have wanted to get them dirty.

Healing magic poured into her, soothing the pain and easing her breath. Faith brushed against her mind, filling her with a sense that there _must_ have been a good reason for whatever that was that just happened to her, and that everything was certainly going to be all right.

The terror had drained away, leaving Ev calm. Or maybe just tired? No, she definitely felt calm, or something like it. Did she know any words for calm that didn't make it sound like a good thing, necessarily?

Right. Of course she did. But this wasn't _that_.

She had another one lurking somewhere in the fog of her mind. Started with an 's'. Sedentary? That was a lifestyle, not a feeling. Sedated?

Sedate. Ev felt sedate.

She _also_ felt tired, though. Without the pain to keep her awake, sleep quickly overtook her.

—

"Ev? Hey, Ev. Rough day, huh?"

A soft voice stroked her mind and gentle hands stroked her face, easing her awake. She was still in the cot, but now instead of Lydia, it was Pauline who stood over her. She'd taken off her helmet and, more unusually, her gauntlets.

"Hi, Pauline," said Ev. "I'm sorry I yelled at you. I didn't mean what I said."

"I know, Ev. I'm sorry too, that it came to this. I really am. I just... How was I supposed to get through to you? It clearly wasn't real enough to you when I just told you."

What wasn't real enough? Ev wanted to know, but the question didn't take hold of her voice the way such burning questions usually did. She waited in silence, and eventually Pauline spoke again.

"Have you talked much to the Tranquil?" she asked.

Ev's voice curled up even tighter, sinking from her throat and settling heavily in her chest, and she only shook her head in answer.

Pauline smiled wryly. "Not particularly engaging conversationalists, are they? Still, I've asked a few of them what it's like. The answers they tend to give are... strange. They talk about feeling pressed between panes of glass, or encased in crystal, or... well." Her frown returned. "Or plunged underwater. Without emotions, they seem to just feel it as something _physically_ cold and clear and smothering."

Ev shuddered. Her skin felt impossibly clammy against the dry, warm sheets and Pauline's dry, warm hands. A convulsion of coughing and heaving gripped her, interrupting Pauline, and she was sorry for that. She had no excuse. The water was long gone — and so, thanks to Lydia, was the damage it had worn into her body.

"Ev? You all right?" Pauline asked in alarm.

Ev nodded and gulped down the bile that had risen into her mouth.

Pauline sighed and closed her eyes for a moment, visibly collecting her thoughts. "It's just that... well," she said, meeting Ev's gaze again, "you can't keep going like you are. You just can't. You'll wind up dead or Tranquil. But now you have a point of reference for both, and maybe that will help."

"I see." That made sense. Horrible, cold, heavy sense, but sense. "I think it will. Help, I mean." She'd thought that was a lie when she'd started to say it, but as it came out of her mouth, she realized the fact that she even _could_ lie instead of blurting out something stupid and making everything worse meant that it was maybe a little bit true.

Maybe things would be different now. Ev already felt different. How could she not be, after dying?

"Good. I'm glad. Now let's get you back to the dormitory so you can sleep in your own bed." Pauline leaned down and kissed her cheek, like family.


	11. A Sedate Place

The cell that the Templars brought her to was smaller than Ev remembered. They let down the chains from the ceiling and used them to restrain her, which no one had ever bothered with back when Ev had been a child. When she stood with her arms at her sides, there was just enough slack that the weight of the thick iron manacles rested entirely on her wrists, making it difficult but not impossible to move her hands.

Ser Martin hit her with another smite that knocked her off her feet and nearly tore apart the joints of her arms as the chains jolted taut. She half lay on her stomach, half hung by her wrists with her head and chest unable to reach the ground. Ser Martin laid a boot across the small of her back and shifted his weight onto it to press her down. "Have a little taste of what's to come," he said as he grabbed hold of one of the chains and yanked upward.

The muscles through the whole right side of Ev's body lit up as though on fire and strained until she thought that they might snap. The edge of the shackle cut into her wrist until she felt something wet welling up where it stung most. Her thin-stretched lungs struggled to pull in enough air to replace what she screamed away, and soon her voice was smothered down to a breathless whimper as her head spun and her vision clouded over.

Lydia wasn't here this time to revive her if her breathing stopped. Did Ser Martin understand what he was doing to her body well enough to avoid killing her? Would he even want to avoid killing her?

Just as she began to think that he might not, Ser Martin released her and took a step back. The pain in Ev's arm and chest dulled to a more bearable soreness, while the pain of the cut on her wrist came into sharp focus. Gasping for breath, she pulled herself up to her knees to get her weight off of the wound. The chains remained taut and forced her elbows to bend at an awkward angle, but at least the shackles no longer dug into her skin quite so mercilessly.

"Maker willing, by the time this is over, you will hang by your neck instead of by your arms," Ser Martin told her. "Pray. Repent. Resist the temptation to make excuses for yourself. I do not pretend to understand the mystery of the Maker's grace, only the work that He has bid His servants do. There may be salvation for you yet, though not in this life."

As his words drew her attention back outside herself, Ev became aware of Belinda screaming in the next cell over. The wall between them was solid stone rather than the iron bars that made up the front of the cage, so Ev could see nothing, only hear the rattle of metal and Belinda's shouts of "no!" and "cold!" and "hurts!" and "stop!" growing shriller and more strained. Then her voice gave out completely, and all that remained was her rasping sobs and the snickering of the Templar hurting her.

"Ser Martin!" a voice that Ev did not immediately recognize called from the end of the hallway. "Are you down here? The First Enchanter wishes to speak with you."

"Of course she does!" Ser Martin called back. He grabbed Ev's face again and stared at her as though he meant to say some parting words, but then released her after a moment and stepped out from her cell in silence. Maybe he'd decided that sinking his fingertips into the bruises forming where he'd held her earlier said everything necessary. "Come on," he told his colleague in Belinda's cell, and the two of them left without another word, pausing only to lock the cage doors behind them. Their footsteps faded away down the hall, but the sound of Belinda crying continued.

"I'm sorry," Ev told her.

"It's so stupid!" Belinda wailed. "Lots of normal people read that book too, and no one thinks that they're planning to blow up another Chantry, or whatever it's supposed to say about us!"

Normal people hadn't been inspired by the story of the Kirkwall uprising to overthrow most of the Circles in Thedas and attempt to assassinate the Divine. Ev didn't say that, though, because Belinda had a decent point regardless. "They're going way too far," she agreed. "There's no way he's going to be allowed to hang us."

"They don't have to hang us! They can just torture us until we break and 'make' them kill us! Wasn't that what they did to Nenaril?"

Was it? Pauline hadn't made it sound like that, but Pauline hadn't been there to see it. "I'm sorry."

"I don't care if you're sorry! Nenaril died down here! She died alone except for the people who murdered her, and who knows what else they did to her first!"

"I'm sorry!"

"Shut up! I don't want to listen to your pointless apologies!"

Ev bit her lip and tried to cry quietly. She wasn't perfect at it, but Belinda didn't say anything else, so Ev supposed she was at least managing well enough that Belinda could choose to ignore her.

Time passed. No one brought food or water, which was just as well. Ev had to struggle against the chains to get her hands under her skirt and pull her clothes out of the way for a piss in the corner, and the whole ordeal managed to be exhausting and humiliating enough that she didn't particularly mind being thirsty if that meant not having to go through it more than once.

"Why did you try to cover for me?" Belinda asked eventually. By that time, she'd been quiet for long enough that Ev had almost forgotten she was there.

"You actually want to talk to me now?" Ev asked, surprised. "Are you sure?"

"Just answer the question!"

"Because I'm not a complete monster after all."

"That isn't a real reason."

"I don't know, then. Probably the same reason you tried to cover for me."

"Couldn't be," said Belinda. "I just did it because I don't have much to lose. That's why I do most things."

"How is that any more of a reason than the one I gave?"

"Because yours was less an answer than a weird accusation! I don't think you're a complete monster. I've never thought that. I know you aren't as bad as they are. I just pick on you because I can get at you and not them."

"'Them' being the Templars?" Ev asked.

"And some of the older mages. Though you probably will be on their level someday. Ugh, you're like a baby Lydia."

"Lydia isn't so bad."

Belinda groaned loudly. "See? See?! You're doing it right now: making excuses, like she does. 'Oh, Ev and Belinda are so silly, bickering like children, ha ha ha, I wonder how that started?' As though she had no part in it. As though she didn't do exactly what you did, only worse and on purpose. But, hey, maybe she really doesn't remember! Maybe when you sacrifice enough kids, you eventually start to lose track of them all!"

"I'm sorry," Ev said.

"I know you are! That's another excuse you make for them! Blaming yourself lets them off the hook!"

"Sorry," Ev said again, for some reason.

"Stop it! Please, please just say literally anything else! Why don't you ask me a question? You must have a bunch of questions."

Ev couldn't deny that. "Why and how did you take my book?"

"Oh, the 'how' is easy. I figured out where your room was a while back. I just had to ask an appropriate person at an appropriate time so I could go visit you, but then I decided it would be even better if I put off the 'visit' until you were away."

"So you could search my things and steal from me?"

"Yeah!" Belinda's voice held no trace of anything resembling remorse. "I wasn't expecting to find anything as good as what I did, but I wanted to take _something_. You went out shopping! You brought back whole bags full of stuff! You haven't forgotten how it is back in our wing, have you? Sometimes you can maybe stash a thing or two in your mattress, if you somehow get ahold of anything worth stashing, but for the most part, all you ever really have is what's attached to you. And sooner or later they'll probably take that, too, and then you'll never get to have anything else."

"I'm sorry," Ev said, then cringed when she remembered she was supposed to stop apologizing.

"I don't want your pity," Belinda responded, absurdly.

"Then why do you never stop talking about how you're going to die?"

"Seriously? Is that a real question? Because I'm going to die! And it's not like I'm sick or something, either! I'm going to be murdered, and I walk around looking at my murderers every day, and everyone who could stop them just wants me to pretend it's normal! Would _you_ take that quietly?"

"Maybe I would." Ev had been afraid for her life often enough, but the last time she could remember intentionally bothering anyone else about it was the last time she had been down here. "What's the point of screaming, if no one's going to save you?"

"You've got it completely backwards! If no one's going to save you no matter how good and quiet you are, what's the point of _not_ screaming?"

"So you don't get water in your lungs?" Ev could feel it there now. She coughed, and the uncontrolled jerking of her body set the chains shaking. The shackle around her right wrist rubbed against the raw flesh beneath her broken skin.

"What's that mean? Are we underwater now? Fine, we're underwater now! But you know what? I'm still right, because how long can you hold your breath anyway?"

"No one will hear you, though." Maybe if she just kept talking, she would remember that she could still breathe.

"You heard me! I know you heard me, even with the years and years and years spent pretending that you didn't, because we are having this conversation right now, and we both know what we're talking about even when we're talking about it in stupid metaphors!"

"If you think it's a metaphor, then you don't know what I'm talking about at all."

"Oh." Belinda suddenly sounded more subdued. Ev felt a little impressed with herself for that. "Is that what they did to you, the last time they tortured you?"

"I don't know if I would really call it torture."

"What would you call it, then?"

"I... don't know." The admission disturbed her. How could she not have a word for it, after ten whole years? She'd never talked about it, true, but Ev liked to have precise and accurate words even for things that didn't leave her own head. Had she never even thought about it? "It was... a punishment, certainly, but also a lesson. A correction."

"Bullshit!" said Belinda, the agitation already springing back into her voice. "They didn't teach you anything worthwhile! They just broke you! They tortured you and broke you!"

"No, they didn't," Ev insisted. "They could have, and they eventually would have if I hadn't calmed down on my own. You know what I'm talking about, right? That's where I was headed. I couldn't control myself before, so it was necessary, and afterward I could, so it _worked_."

"Did it?" Belinda asked. "Look where you are now!"

Ev had been trying not to. If Belinda was going to make her, then there wasn't much point in talking.

"Ev?" Belinda prodded her. Then, when she didn't respond: "Princess?" Then, a couple minutes later: "Come on, say something! Anything! Fight me! Don't leave me alone!"

"It's not so bad being alone," said Ev. "It's safer."

"I don't want to be safe! I just want to exist to someone!"

Ev went silent again. Belinda started screaming. Ev started crying and didn't bother to be quiet about it this time. Maybe that was good enough for Belinda, because after a while, the screaming stopped.

—

Ev expected to hear whoever came for her long before she saw them, but there was no clank of metal on stone to herald the arrival of the Tranquil elven woman in soft slippers and Fomari robes. She simply stepped into view on the other side of the cell bars.

"Belinda," she said flatly. "Ev." Then she produced a key from the folds of her sleeves and went to work unlocking the cage doors.

"What?" Belinda asked in alarm as the Tranquil entered her cell. Ev heard the clicks and clinks of shackles unlocking and chains falling away. "No! No, no, no, this is a dream! Go away, demon!"

The Tranquil did not respond to her, but moved wordlessly on to Ev's cell. Ev closed and reopened her eyes as she was set free from her restraints, and nothing odd happened. None of the other standard tricks would be much use here, but anyhow, she doubted that a dream-Belinda would have drawn her attention to the possibility of this being the Fade. "What are you doing?" she asked her apparently real liberator.

"Releasing you," said the Tranquil. "Do you not recognize me, Ev?"

Ev thought it over. "Aren't you the Fomari shopkeeper I saw when Pauline took me out to the marketplace?"

"That is not incorrect," said the Tranquil.

"Ev, are you blind?" Belinda asked, still hidden from Ev's sight behind the stone wall. "Just how dark for you is it down here? That's Nenaril!"

"That is correct," said Nenaril.

"That can't be!" Ev blurted out, but even as the words left her mouth, she realized it was the truth. Nenaril's chocolate-colored curls had been cut level with her chin, and her face had grown gaunt, and her amber eyes no longer stared with the same intensity they once had, but this was still her. "Pauline said you were dead!"

"It would not be unusual for someone in her position to lie," said Nenaril.

"Someone in her position?"

"Yes: someone who has done something for which they know the person to whom they are lying would judge them harshly. That might also explain why I have been so consistently assigned to the Templars' quarters, where apprentices would be unlikely to see me."

"No!" Belinda screamed. "Creators, no! Please don't be real! Please, please, please!"

"I would suggest that you control your volume more carefully as we make our escape," Nenaril told her.

"Escape?" Ev did not ask about the rest of it, because she knew she probably ought to control her volume, too. She crossed her arms over her chest and pressed her fingers into the wound on her wrist until the pain took up too much space in her head for her to think of more than one thing at a time. "Why would you help us escape?"

"It is complicated, and I do not have long to explain. Suffice it to say that I have decided the time has come to take a calculated risk, and the two of you are part of my calculation."

"I don't believe you!" Belinda yelled at her. "Ev, it's obviously a Templar's trap, right? One of them must have told her to do this, to make us look worse! That isn't really Nenaril, it's just a moving corpse they're using like a puppet!"

"You contradict yourself, Belinda," said Nenaril. "You were the one who first identified me. As you said, I am Nenaril. It is true that I have changed since we last met. It is also true that, as I am now, I cannot be a friend to you in the way that I once was. However, I am alive, and I would prefer to remain that way. While living in the vicinity of Templars, I am not infrequently beaten. I am not infrequently raped. Even if the situation does not escalate, it is probable that they will eventually kill me without intending to. Additionally, I suspect that the situation will in fact escalate."

"You think there's an annulment coming?" Ev guessed. It was a struggle to follow Nenaril's eerie speech, especially through the noise of Belinda sobbing. If Ev started sobbing too, she wouldn't be able to understand any of it. Fortunately, she seemed to have cried herself sedate long before Nenaril showed up. "You would be the first to know, wouldn't you? You're around the Templars more than the rest of us, and I doubt they bother watching their words on your account."

"Ev, don't believe her!" Belinda pleaded. "Don't talk to her about this like any of it is real! It isn't real! It can't be!"

"No one has said so directly," Nenaril answered to Ev, "but I predict that it is only a matter of time until an appropriate excuse is found."

"And you can't run away on your own, because you'd be helpless," Ev concluded.

"Correct," said Nenaril.

Ev stepped forward through the cell door, and Nenaril moved with her. Belinda sat huddled in the far corner of her own cell, hugging her braid to her chest. She glared when the two of them came into view.

"Belinda," Ev said, willing herself to speak more gently now that the stone wall would not muffle her words, "I think she's telling the truth."

"It wouldn't matter even if she was," said Belinda. "Did she get our phylacteries? No? Then we'll still be caught."

"There's safety in numbers, isn't there?" Ev pointed out. "There are free mages at Andoral's Reach and Redcliffe, and just knowing their locations hasn't helped the Templars recapture them."

"You say that like there's any chance of us making it that far south. We probably won't even make it down the mountain."

"We'll make it farther than we would just sitting here and waiting for Ser Martin to come back."

"Right, and we'll be punished for every inch! You said it yourself: he probably can't hang us just for the book. But the book _and_ conspiring to escape?"

"You were the one who said that he doesn't have to hang us. And... Belinda?" Ev hesitated. It felt unfair to say, but Nenaril was standing next to her and watching Belinda with dead eyes set beneath a sunburst scar on her brow, so not saying it wouldn't make it any less real. "You aren't Harrowed. He doesn't even have to kill you."

Belinda shoved her braid into her mouth and bit down on it to stifle her scream.

"I would add that, if you stay, you will likely be held accountable for the progress I have already made," Nenaril said. "You cannot refasten your own shackles without aid, which I decline to provide."

"It's not like you care!" Belinda spat out the words along with her hair. "You just want someone to protect you, right? Ev's better at magic than I am, and she knows more about the outside world than I do, so what do you need me for?"

"As I already stated, I do not have time to explain," said Nenaril. "However, I will clarify that one of my reasons for deciding to act now rather than later is that I have determined your survival would be beneficial. It is an entirely different matter than the use I have for Ev's cooperation."

_So she still likes Belinda better than me, even now that she can't really like anything at all._ Ev bit her tongue and choked down a bitter laugh, then pressed her fingers deeper into her wound until the nails dug up fresh wellsprings of blood. _She still likes Belinda better than me, even now that Belinda doesn't seem to like—_

Oh. Of course.

"Belinda, are you so insistent on staying in there _because_ Nenaril is the one trying to help us?" Ev asked.

"I already told you: that isn't Nenaril!"

So that was a yes, then.

"Belinda," said Nenaril, "did you not once tell me that you simply wished to be acknowledged?"

"I probably said something like that, I guess," said Belinda. "So what? I already know you have her memories. That still doesn't mean that you're—"

Nenaril cut her off. "Acknowledge me."

Ev did not see Belinda's reaction, because her own reaction was to turn and stare. Nenaril's voice had not changed in volume or inflection, but her placid tone did nothing to diminish the force of the words spoken in it. Ev had spent far more time around Tranquil mages than she would have chosen to if she'd ever had a choice, and not once had she heard one of them issue a command.

"Fine," said Belinda, breaking the silence that Nenaril had cast. She got to her feet and crossed the cell to stand with them just outside the open door. "I do. Let's go, then."

"Follow me," said Nenaril. Another command. "Stay close and make no sound. I am familiar with the layout of this part of the fortress and know the likely movements of the Templars within it."

"I'm sorry," Ev told her as the realization struck that she needed to say it now, before there could be no more words. "Nenaril, I am so, so sorry."

"At present, I cannot adequately respond to that," said Nenaril. "We will have to discuss it later."

Then she led the way out of the dungeons.


	12. Quiet

Ev half expected to be spotted and seized the moment they got upstairs, but, true to her word, Nenaril led them on a route through the fortress's outer wall that did not cross paths with any Templar patrols. Only when they stumbled out into the night did it become clear just what a hopelessly terrible decision Ev had made. She was practically blind without torches or glowstones for light, and had to cling to Nenaril's arm to avoid being lost to the darkness as they descended along the mountain road. The rough stone shredded the soles of her slippers in a matter of minutes and then began gnawing at the skin of her feet. She tripped and fell repeatedly, dragging Nenaril down with her, and every time she stood back up, the way her legs struggled to lift the weight of her own body reminded her that she hadn't eaten since breakfast.

"Wonder how long it'll take before we go over a cliff and out of our misery," Belinda muttered the third or fourth time she had to regain her footing after a spill of her own.

"That is unlikely to occur," Nenaril informed her. "I do have a plan to maximize our chance of survival, though I have not divulged all of the details."

"Can you tell us more about it now?" Ev asked.

"No. It is complicated."

"I can handle complicated," Ev said. "I'm less sure how much longer I can handle walking on my own bleeding sores without knowing where I'm going or what the point of it all is."

"There is... a difficulty. The plan itself is one thing, but the significance it would take on within your own minds would be a further complication. I apologize, but I cannot describe it in a way that would allow you to understand it as I understand it."

"Because we have feelings?" Belinda guessed.

"That is a relevant concern, yes."

Well, that sounded ominous. "And you don't think that we can be rational about it?" Ev asked.

"'Rational' is a word you have chosen. It is not necessarily one that I would have used," said Nenaril. "However, it is close to accurate."

"What word would you prefer, then?"

"That is the difficulty: I do not have precise enough words. Our language was not conceived for the use of people with my perspective."

"Obviously," Belinda scoffed. "I mean, we could start with all the problems with calling people like you 'tranquil' and go from there."

"I really, _really_ don't feel well," said Ev. "Can we pause and take a break?"

"No," said Nenaril, "we must continue walking for approximately five hundred yards. Then we will break."

That would be more than two full laps around the courtyard, then. "I don't know if I can make it that far."

"You may lean more of your weight against me as we walk," Nenaril offered. "I am accustomed to physical labor."

Ev did. It alleviated some of the pain in her feet and the trembling in her legs, but not a bit of the churning in her gut. If anything, that just got worse.

What had she been thinking when she'd agreed to go along with the escape? Nenaril had come to her for help, and it had barely even occurred to Ev that refusing was an option. Part of it had been that she'd so desperately wanted to be anywhere in the world other than the dungeons beneath Ostwick Circle, but she'd also just wanted to do whatever Nenaril asked, because nothing she could do for Nenaril would ever cancel out her debt. Yet, here they were now, with Nenaril helping _her_ far more than the other way around. It was perverse.

"We are almost there," Nenaril said after long minutes of trudging. "This will likely be unpleasant, but please try to remain calm."

"'Unpleasant' how?" Belinda asked.

Nenaril did not answer her. She just led them down a stretch of road that looped around a rocky outcropping. When they turned the corner, they were confronted by a sudden flare of light that made Ev flinch.

The smite hit while Ev was still blinded. She fell, and suddenly Nenaril was no longer there to catch her, and pain shot through her hands when they struck against the stony ground. She couldn't see Belinda, but she heard her scream.

"And there we have it, Sers," said the voice that Ev had come to dread hearing more than any other. "First they smuggled contraband in, and now they are attempting to smuggle each other out. If we show lenience here, the whole Circle will likely turn to anarchy."

As her vision unclouded, Ev saw Ser Martin and two other Templars standing over her, their helmets off and their hungry eyes bared. Ev didn't know the name of the one holding the glowstone — he looked like so many of the men in the order, fair skin and short hair and a clean-shaven, square-jawed face — but she guessed he was Ser Martin's friend who had tortured Belinda. The other she recognized as Ostwick's Knight-Captain, Ser Andrea. Ev had always tried to avoid speaking to Templar officers directly, instead leaning on Pauline to intercede for her when necessary, so she had little idea what to expect from Andrea. She knew only that it couldn't possibly be a good thing if Ser Martin had managed to get the Knight-Captain's ear.

"I quite agree," said Andrea. She kneeled down, unslung a length of chain from her shoulder, and set to work fastening the shackles on one end of it to Ev's wrists. Ev got a look at her own stinging hands as the Templar grabbed and moved them. Her palms were nothing but bits of hanging skin and embedded gravel and thick, half-congealed blood.

"I knew it!" Belinda ranted from somewhere off to the side. "I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!"

"One question remains, though," Andrea continued. She got to her feet and yanked on the chain until Ev managed to stand with her. "What _are_ we going to do with them?"

She handed the leash off to Ser Martin, who nearly sent Ev toppling right back to her knees as he pulled her in toward him.

"The apprentice is easily dealt with," said Ser Martin. "Put her to the brand and set her to work where she'll be seen."

"No! Let go of me!" Belinda shouted from somewhere at Ev's back. There was a sound of metal slamming into flesh, and then a scream of pain. "I'll make you kill me! Let go, or I'll make you! I'll—" Another, louder impact cut her off, followed by another, louder scream.

"Please try to remain calm," said Nenaril. Ev started and turned toward her voice to see her standing beside the Templar with the glowstone. In the rush of pain and fear, Ev had forgotten to keep track of her or even to wonder where she'd gone.

"Fuck you!" Belinda yelled back. "Traitor! I knew you weren't real! I knew it!"

"This was the plan," said Nenaril. "As you requested when I encountered you in the dungeons early this afternoon, I returned when it was dark out to aid in your escape." Ev stared, and Nenaril looked directly into her eyes. "You said nothing about remaining silent through the intervening hours." She shifted her gaze, likely to make eye contact with Belinda as she repeated, "This was the plan. Please try to remain calm."

"You're awful noisy today, Bunny," said the Templar standing next to her. He sounded only mildly annoyed, not at all surprised. Ser Martin just laughed. The sequence of events that Nenaril had described must not have sounded blatantly wrong to them.

So they hadn't told Nenaril to lure out Ev and Belinda and then lain in ambush. Nenaril had lied to the Templars before she'd even set foot in the dungeons. She had told _them_ where to wait.

"What," Ev asked, "the fuck?"

"Such a mouth on you," said Ser Martin. He took hold of her by the neck, and though he did not squeeze down and choke her — yet — Ev could feel the pulse in her throat straining against the vise of his fingers. "I would like very much for everyone to see what becomes of this one, too," he told Ser Andrea. "So much of our work is kept hidden behind locked doors, as though it were something to shame us. It is time we remembered who is righteous in the Maker's eyes, and who has true reason to be ashamed. String her up in the courtyard and leave her as food for the birds and a message to the mages and the corrupt. That's the best use anyone will ever get from her."

"She's a skinny little slip of a thing, isn't she?" the Knight-Captain said. "She'll make quite a show kicking and twisting about on the rope. Yes, I will see it done."

Ev was silent as the Templars escorted her and Belinda back the way they'd come. What could Nenaril be thinking? Ev realized with a chill that she had no way to even guess. Nenaril herself had said that her mind worked too differently for Ev or Belinda to understand it. She seemed to be asking them to keep trusting her, and Ev desperately wanted to — in part because she was Nenaril, in part just because Ev had no better ideas. How much was trust worth, though, when for all Ev knew, Nenaril might not have any real concept of what people who weren't Tranquil would want for themselves, or why they would want it?

She fell after just the first few steps, and Ser Martin didn't stop pulling her, and her knees were bleeding too by the time she managed to get her legs back under her and stumble after him. What would happen if — when — she stopped being able to walk at all? Would he carry her? Ev hated that she was reduced to hoping he would, because she hated the idea of being in his arms, but the only alternative she could think of was to be dragged along the ground all the way back to the fortress, and that might kill her. It would tear up her chest and stomach like her hands and feet and knees had been torn, and she might die before a healer could reach her. Even if she didn't, she would certainly want to be dead, and already there were whispers crowding in her mind and hungry shadows straining against reality to lap at her blood.

When they made it back around the outcropping, Ev spotted another light in the distance. Whoever was carrying it must have spotted her, too, because it began to move more quickly.

"Ev?" Pauline's voice called out. "Ev, is that you down there?"

"Pauline!" Ev's heart fluttered with hope. "Yes, it's me! Pauline, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, but I need your help again, please!"

"Oh, for Andraste's sake," Ser Martin groaned as he cuffed her in the jaw to shut her up.

"Don't worry. I'll handle this," the Knight-Captain assured him. "How did she know we were out here, though?"

"Well, _I_ didn't let it slip," said the other Templar. "Bunny?"

"You specifically instructed me not to tell Ser Trevelyan," said Nenaril. "Though it seemed to me that the information would be relevant to her, I did not disobey you. In any event, this is not a hitch in the plan. Please try to remain calm."

"I didn't ask for your advice," he said, and tweaked her ear hard enough to make her yelp.

"Let go of her!" Pauline demanded of Ser Martin as she drew near. She seized the chain from him and shoved him aside to pull Ev into a protective embrace, and Ser Martin did not fight against it. "Ev, you look like death! What did he do to you?"

"Hurts," was all that Ev could manage to say in response. It did not help that Pauline was now squeezing the air from her chest, though Ev would gladly take that over remaining in Ser Martin's hands for another second.

"I seem to recall you promised that you wouldn't go behind anyone's back," said Knight-Commander Rahl, who followed on Pauline's heels flanked by the First Enchanter and three other Templars, all unmasked.

"Oh, I'm not the one trying to circumvent the rules here," said Ser Martin.

"Then I suppose you have a perfectly good explanation," said Sofia, "for why the holding cells were empty, and you and your cohorts were spotted slinking off into the night, and when we put two and two together and followed you out here, we did, in fact, get four?"

" _I_ have an explanation," said Andrea, stepping forward.

"Knight-Captain?" Rahl asked in surprise. "What are you doing here?"

"Oh? So I wasn't one of the 'cohorts' you were told that he'd 'slunk off' with? I suppose this does all look a bit less legitimate without that information."

Ev could feel Pauline's arms tighten around her anxiously as the Knight-Captain relayed what had happened the way she understood it. The pressure grew almost bruising, but Ev couldn't blame Pauline, because she was scared nearly out of her mind too. Even when she hadn't done anything wrong, simply being in the presence of either of the two highest ranking Templars at Ostwick was usually enough to terrify her, and now here they both were at once.

Here they both were at once, a mile or so beyond the wall of the fortress in the dead of night, and neither of them seemed to have known that the other would be here.

"Wait a second," said Ev, but Pauline hushed her and pressed a hand against the back of her head in a gesture of both comfort and warning before she could ask, _Who's left in charge back at the Circle?_

This _was_ a trap. Ev felt suddenly certain of it. This was a trap, and she was not the quarry. She was the bait.

Who had set the snare, though? Nenaril couldn't possibly have done this all on her own. Was Pauline in on it, or was she a target?

Ev squirmed from her cousin's grip just enough to peer around her side. Knight-Captain Andrea still had Belinda's leash. She, Ser Martin, and Rahl had clustered together to speak face to face in the light of a glowstone held by one of the Templars in the Knight-Commander's retinue. The other two Templars that had arrived with him hung back, as did Sofia — who, Ev realized while she watched, seemed to be inching slowly up the road away from them. The First Enchanter's eyes were locked on something just over Ev's shoulder. When Ev twisted her head to follow her gaze, she saw Nenaril returning her stare, apparently ignoring the Templar who'd been flinging around that grotesque nickname for her earlier and now stood with a hand resting in her hair.

The pieces fell together in Ev's mind just a heartbeat before Nenaril leapt into motion.

She spun on the Templar touching her and swung her fist toward his face. When his mouth dropped open in surprise, she shoved something inside of it. The Templar choked and grabbed her wrist, and he wouldn't have had any trouble prying her hand away except that, before he could manage it, flame burst forth from his eyes and ears and nose, and his grip went slack as he crumpled to the ground with a loud metallic crash and a smell like roasting meat.

Scattered shouts of alarm went up. Pauline let go of Ev to step toward Nenaril and the fallen knight, and the other Templars reacted similarly, but Nenaril darted past them, moving more swiftly than Ev had ever seen a Tranquil mage move. She clutched her burnt hand to her chest, and with her other hand she tossed something behind her as she reached Sofia and the two Templars standing near her. Whatever she had thrown fell not far from Ev's feet, and Ev had just enough time to recognize the lyrium etching as a rune of paralysis before the enchantment activated and all her muscles seized.

Ev's neck locked with her head tilted partway down, but when she strained her eyes upward she could still see what was happening in front of her. The two Templars nearest Sofia had not been hit by the blast, and they drew their swords on Nenaril as she barreled toward them without stopping. The moment they took their eyes off the First Enchanter, though, Sofia's arms lit up and changed shape until her fingers were long and thick enough for her to grab both Templars by their necks, one in each hand, and lift them into the air. They kicked and gagged, and Sofia's gnarled flesh shifted and rippled around their throats. When they went still, she cast them to the ground with enough force to smash open their heads.

Dead. They were dead. Ev had just watched three people die. They'd been alive a moment ago, and now they were burnt meat and shattered bones and so much spilling blood. People were supposed to disappear when they died. They were supposed to just not be anywhere anymore. But the dead Templars lay at their killer's feet, unrelentingly existent in spite of their lifelessness.

"Such a shame," said Sofia. Her voice was only half her own. Something else rumbled along behind it like an echo, or like thunder after nearby lightning. "Such a sad, ugly end of life. But now I better understand the cycles that must run their course. I will not fear to take my place in them. I will weep once the wheel has completed its turn, and that will be enough."

"I believe that this fulfills my end of the deal." Nenaril stood before the abomination that had once been Sofia and spoke to it in the same calm, deliberate tone that the Tranquil always used. "Now it is your turn. Even if I am not to be the catalyst, I deserve to be paid what I am owed."

"Just listen to you," said Sofia, an eerily gentle smile breaking over her face. "Already demanding your dues, and we've barely even begun. I am so proud of you."

"I require the means of survival," said Nenaril. "Your pride means nothing to me."

"Of course it doesn't. Poor dear. Well, that all ends now. Come to me, child." The First Enchanter held out her arms, which shriveled back down to human form. Nenaril stepped between her outstretched hands, and Sofia touched her fingertips to the Tranquil girl's temples. When she spoke again, the thunder did not speak with her. "Safe travels, my friend. I will miss you."

The world lit up, and Nenaril screamed.

When Ev could see again, Nenaril was on her knees with her head thrown back. Twin beams of light shot up from her eyes toward the dark sky above, less like the reflections that sometimes shone in her or Belinda's pupils than like the enchantment she had used to burn a man from the inside. She kept screaming even as Sofia moved past her to lunge at the Templars who still stood paralyzed.

The First Enchanter had a knife in her hand. She must have drawn it while Ev had been blinded, or while she'd been distracted by Nenaril burning. She thrust it into each of the Knight-Commander's eyes, one after the other, and then into the Knight-Captain's. The Templar officers did not cry out, and they did not fall. They remained transfixed, pouring out torrents of blood like fountain statues poured water.

The first sign Ev got that the paralysis had begun to wear off was her stomach lurching and her chest heaving with terrified sobs. Then Ser Martin managed to lift a hand and send Sofia flying backward with a smite before she could get her knife in him. He and the other remaining Templar drew their swords as the First Enchanter struggled to her feet, while Rahl and Andrea crumpled belatedly, silent but for the clatter of their armor against the stone.

Peals of Belinda's unhinged laughter rang out to accompany Nenaril's ongoing screams. "Fuck you all!" she shouted, and yanked her leash free from Andrea's brittle death-grip. "Fuck you fuck you fuck you _die_!" Before Ser Martin could turn toward her, she leapt onto his back, threw her arms over his head, then let herself fall so that the chain connecting her wrists caught around his throat.

"Ev, don't just stand there!" Pauline's voice calling her name pulled Ev's attention back toward herself. A tug on her own leash sent her toppling backward, but Pauline caught her so that she only banged herself up on her cousin's breastplate instead of cracking her head open on the stony ground. "Shit. Just how hurt are you?"

"A lot," said Ev, which couldn't have been very helpful. "Too much for words, I guess. I'm sorry."

"It's a little late for that!" Ev flinched at the anger in her cousin's voice, but Pauline just picked up the glowstone dropped by the Templar that Nenaril had killed, then scooped Ev into her arms. "Come on, let's get out of here. You need healing, and I need to warn the others." She staggered up a rocky slope, cutting past the battle and heading for where the road doubled back across the mountain.

Nenaril went quiet just as someone else began screaming. Ev lifted her head to peer over Pauline's shoulder and saw Sofia sink her knife hilt-deep into Ser Martin's eye. His sword arm flailed about, wild and ineffectual. The other Templar had to back off to avoid being struck by his death throes, giving Belinda an opening to get herself free before Ser Martin could topple over backward and crush her.

Nenaril remained off on her own, kneeling with her chin fallen against her chest. The lights in her eyes had gone out, and the only sign of life that Ev could see was a trembling of her slumped arms that might just have been the wind catching her robes. In a matter of seconds, she had fallen too far into the distance for Ev to see even that.


	13. Love and Mercy

Moving uphill instead of down and burdened by heavy armor as well as Ev's dead weight in her arms, Pauline still seemed to be making better time returning to the Circle than Ev had made fleeing from it. The battle on the slopes below soon fell out of view. Now with nothing to watch but the silhouette of the fortress looming ever nearer, all that Ev had left to do was think.

Ser Martin was dead. He wasn't the only one, but Ev had wanted him to die, and now it had happened, and it was her fault for trusting someone who had asked her to do something so obviously wrong. Shouldn't she feel at least a little bit bad about that? At the very minimum, shouldn't she be disturbed by having watched it? Before today, she had never actually seen anyone die.

Wait — that wasn't entirely true, was it? The demon at her Harrowing had been an anyone. Ev had killed it herself and never given it a second thought, because it had been a monster. It had said that she didn't believe in monsters anymore, and then it had proven itself wrong. That felt somehow sad.

Despair had wanted to be free and whole. It had wanted the power to take freedom and wholeness for itself, no matter what stood in its way. Ev could understand that, however angry she felt when she thought of all the people like her it had killed to reach its goals. She would never understand why Ser Martin and his friends had treated her and Belinda so cruelly. She would never be able to think of how that one Templar had acted toward Nenaril without wanting to die just so that she could stop knowing everything she'd realized as she'd watched him.

Ev's thoughts were interrupted by the world lighting up red and the air reverberating with a sound like the screech of steam from a boiling kettle. An enormous bird made of crimson flame shot up from the lower slopes and soared above Ev's and Pauline's heads to explode over the fortress in a shower of sparks.

"A signal?" Ev wondered aloud. "To whom, though?"

"More secret abominations?" Pauline guessed. She kept traipsing onward in spite of that frighteningly likely possibility. Ev didn't argue, because there might be people who could hurt her anywhere, while at least back at the Circle there might instead be an infirmary cot and a healer's gentle hands. "And this means that thing is still alive. I had hoped..." Ev was at a poor angle to get a clear view of Pauline's face, but she could hear the grimace in her voice. "Sorry, Avery. I'll make it count for something."

"Was Sofia really an abomination?" Ev asked. "She looked like one, at first, but why would an abomination need a knife? Why would any mage need a knife, unless she'd exhausted her power?"

"Who knows why? Only the demon, probably. All I know is that nothing any of you learn from the Circle does that thing she did with her arms, but getting possessed does."

"What if it was neither? There are types of magic that the Circle doesn't teach."

"You're picking out some really weird things to focus on considering how many people just died, Ev!"

"Sorry. I'm used to people dying, I guess. I thought that you were too, so it would be okay to ask while it was just us."

"I'm not used to people dying like _that_!"

 _Like what?_ Ev refrained from asking — mostly because Pauline was already huffing for breath that she shouldn't have to waste answering Ev's stupid questions, and only maybe a little because Ev suspected she wouldn't like the answer. It couldn't be the same thing that made it different for Ev. Pauline had almost certainly seen how death looked up close long before this. Ev had too, but only once, and she'd forgotten all about it because the person she'd killed had been something she didn't usually think of as a person.

Pauline's pace began to flag as the distance and the steep incline wore on her. Ev wondered if maybe she should ask Pauline to set her down and finish the trip alone. She could come back for Ev later with more people to help carry her, or maybe with a healer to get her back on her own feet. They were already so close to the fortress, though. They had covered far more ground than they had left to traverse, and even through the darkness, Ev could make out many of the details in the shape of the outer wall.

They were not quite close enough to be within the blast radius when the center of that wall exploded.

The explosion itself lasted for little more than a second, but some of the bits of scattered debris burned on, breaking up the night's darkness like a network of beacons. In their light, Ev could see people — no bigger than bugs at this distance, both shining plate-armor beetles and skinny damselflies with wings of dark cloth — swarming the now-exposed courtyard.

"Maker forgive me," Pauline murmured. She set Ev down on the ground and doubled over panting. "I was too slow. What now? I have to fix this. I know I can fix this. Maker, give me strength and guidance!"

Ev leaned back against a jutting rock. It wasn't exactly comfortable, but it was better than lying down on the ground or forcing herself to sit up without support. If only her clothes were a little bit thicker, it might be all right. Or if her hair were longer and thicker.

"You told me that Nenaril was dead," she said to Pauline.

She hadn't entirely meant to say it out loud. She just hadn't put any effort into keeping it inside her head.

"Well, if she wasn't before, she certainly is now!" Pauline answered with a half-smothered, bitter laugh.

Was she? She hadn't looked dead to Ev, but maybe that just meant she hadn't looked like the Templars lain out prone and bloody with half-destroyed heads. Pauline would probably know better than Ev did. "There's no 'if,' though. She was alive for years. Eight long years, and I didn't... I never even..." What would she have done, if she'd known? What could she have done? "Why did you lie? What were you afraid of?"

"It's really not the time for this, Ev!"

"When will it be time, then?" Ev pressed her. "Pauline... I don't know what's going to happen to me. I don't even know what I'm feeling about that. All I know for sure is that answers would be good right about now. I want to understand while I'm still here."

"Don't talk like that! I won't let anything bad happen to you."

"What about Belinda? Can you protect her, too?"

"She's probably already dead, Ev. That, or possessed."

"But what if she isn't?"

"She pretty much has to be by now."

"But what if she _isn't_?" She saw Pauline jerk backward at the sudden rise in her volume. Ev would have been surprised at herself, too, if she were not already so far beyond surprise. "You can't know that she is! Do you want it to be too late? Is it just that it's easier if there's nothing left we can do? Is that why you lied about Nenaril? Is that why you made her spend all her time around those... those..?"

"Ev, take it easy," Pauline cut in as Ev stammered. "You're delirious."

"So what if I am? Didn't you hear what that one she killed with fire kept calling her? Did they all call her that?"

Pauline turned her face away, just slightly. "Elven names like hers can be kind of a mouthful, that's all. No one meant anything by it."

"You're lying!" said Ev. "None of you have a problem spitting out 'Knight-Commander This' or 'First Enchanter That'! You'll struggle through however many syllables you have to if it's for someone you respect! And that's not the point, anyway! The point is: what were you so desperately trying to hide from me? Were you lying about not being there, too? Did you hold her down while they—? Or were _you_ the one who burned her? Is that what you don't want me to know?"

"It's not about what I did, all right? I just didn't want you to have to keep thinking about her. She wasn't suffering anymore, so why should you?"

"She _was_ suffering! You made sure that she— Wait. Was all of it your idea from the start?" The stricken look on Pauline's face was the only answer Ev needed. "Oh. Of course it was. Lydia would have gone to you before anyone else, since it involved me. She went to you, and you decided to take Nenaril away, and... and you burned her, and pinioned her, and gave her to your friends as a toy!"

"Those sort of men are _not_ my friends!" Pauline's abashed expression gave way to a furious snarl. "I didn't do it for them! I did it for you!"

"I didn't fucking ask you to!"

"Of course you didn't! You didn't even tell me what she'd done to you! You never tell me anything, and I have to look out for you anyway!"

"'What she'd done'? She cut my arm! She cut my arm, and you took everything from her, and what did you do about Ser Martin when he did the same thing on purpose?"

"You didn't ask me to do anything about him, either!"

"Maybe that's because of what happened the last time I asked for what I really wanted from you!"

"What happened?" It sounded like a genuine question. "Which time was that?"

"The time right before you had me tortured!" Did Pauline really not remember? How could she not remember? Ev found herself using Belinda's word for it simply because she felt _that_ bitter.

"Tortured? What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about when I was ten!" Ev's chest shuddered. She choked on imaginary water that was maybe just a real sob, but she had too much left to say to let that stop her, and she forced herself to keep saying it. "You had Lydia and that Templar whose name I never even learned almost drown me!"

"Oh! That?" Pauline sighed and halfway smiled with relief. "You're calling _that_ torture? And you thought it was because you asked for something? If you did, I don't even remember that part. No, Ev, it was because you threatened a holy sister! It was because threatening a holy sister was just the latest in a long series of bad decisions that nothing I said to you could stop you from making! And if I hadn't found something that did stop you, you'd probably have been killed or made Tranquil years ago, so I'm not going to apologize for that!"

"I could have been killed right then because of you!" Ev's face was wet, and she faltered for a moment before realizing that she'd been crying. When had she started crying? Was it from the pain of the cuts on her limbs and the bruises on her jaw that she'd mostly stopped consciously noticing, or from the breathlessness she'd been ignoring so that she could keep screaming? Or was it from thinking about not being alive anymore, and how she might die soon anyway? Ev didn't want to die. She had so many questions left unanswered. She had so many sharp words left to pull from the oozing scars in her lungs. "Would you have been sorry if I'd drowned for real?"

"Give me a little credit, Ev! There was never any danger that you were going to drown for real!"

"How can you know that? Lillian did!" Pauline had never said outright that the accident Ev's late aunt had died in probably hadn't been entirely accidental, but wasn't that what she'd meant for Ev to understand?

"Lillian's parents didn't have an experienced healer supervising them!"

"What if Lydia had made a mistake? What if she'd been a little too slow? What if the Templar had decided to ignore her, because Templars don't take orders from mages?"

"You're trying as hard as you can to find something to be angry about, aren't you? None of that happened! You have no reason to think that any of it ever could have happened! And how did you remember Lillian's name, when I only ever told it to you once? It took you years to learn the names of all the apprentices you shared a room with! You _still_ can't remember the names of most of the people who live in the same fortress as you!"

"She was family! Maybe I never got the chance to meet her, but she was like me, wasn't she? And my own grandparents killed her for that! Why don't you tell me the names of all the kids _you've_ killed for being like me? See if I can't remember those!"

"Oh." Pauline took half a step backward, as though she'd been knocked off balance and needed to brace herself. "There it is, then."

"There it fucking is!" Ev agreed.

"All this time I thought that you understood, but you didn't. You never forgave me for not being a shiny fairy tale knight who doesn't ever have to get her hands dirty. Guess what, Ev? We _all_ have to do things that we don't like sometimes! Maybe you thought that you were alone in that! Maybe that's why you always act so persecuted! Well, surprise! Welcome to the real world, Ev! It sure took you long enough to get here!"

"Oh, is _this_ the real world?" In spite of the anger, in spite of the pain, Ev laughed out loud. "Finally! I'm just glad you'll have me! I don't recall asking to be locked away from it in the first place!"

In the beat of silence that followed, a cacophony of shouts, metallic clangs, and explosive battle magic rang out from the fortress just beyond them.

"We can't go back," Pauline said. There was a strange rasp in her voice. "We can't ever, ever go back from this." Then, to Ev's alarm, she burst into tears.

"Pauline?" Ev couldn't remember the last time she had seen her cousin tear up. She had certainly never seen her _weep_ like she was doing now. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean—" Ev had meant every word of it. "I didn't mean to make you cry. I'm really sorry."

"It's okay, Ev. I forgive you." Pauline reached up to wipe her face, but stopped when she caught sight of her dirt-smeared gauntlet. The next sob sounded almost like a laugh as she stared at her heavily armored hand. "Do you think you could ever forgive me?"

"I..." Ev hesitated. Which part of it was she asking forgiveness for? Wouldn't saying yes mean betraying Nenaril? Nenaril had already betrayed Ev, but didn't that just make them even?

Ev looked down at her own hands and saw the shackles still binding them together. However angry she might be at Pauline, she knew that she would never have made it this far without her. She wouldn't even have made it past her Harrowing.

"For the things you did to me?" Ev said. "Yes. I forgive you. All you had to do was ask. I owe you at least that much."

"Thank you, Ev." Pauline breathed deeply until the sobs subsided into sniffles. Then she looked at Ev and smiled, wistful but warm. "Ev... can I ask you for just one more thing? Pray with me. Please."

"Okay?" Ev had never really understood prayer. She'd always thought that the Chantry's teachings concerning whether the Maker still acted upon the world He'd supposedly abandoned were painfully inconsistent. As long as she went through the motions, though, no one seemed to care that she didn't understand. She doubted that the Maker would care either, even assuming that He existed. If He had ever given a damn about her, He wouldn't have made her a mage.

"Transfigurations 12, then," said Pauline, and closed her eyes. "O Maker, hear my cry: Guide me through the blackest nights. Steel my heart against the temptations of the wicked... Come on, Ev, say it with me."

"Make me to rest in the warmest places," Ev joined in. "O Creator, see me kneel..." She wasn't kneeling at all, though. Should she try to rest her weight on her skinned knees? Or to clasp together her mangled hands? She would really prefer not to, and Pauline hadn't scolded her yet. In fact, Pauline had remained standing herself, so Ev probably wasn't doing anything bad.

"For I walk only where You would bid me." Pauline's voice cracked against the verse, and for a moment Ev worried that she would start weeping again, but she pushed through the one, lone sob that bubbled up from her chest and kept chanting. "Stand only in places You have blessed. Sing only the words You place in my throat."

"My Maker, know my heart: Take from me a life of sorrow. Lift me from a world of pain—"

"Ev," Pauline interrupted, "your eyes are open."

"You only know that because you opened yours to check," Ev pointed out.

"Never mind that," said Pauline. "Just close your eyes and go back to praying."

"I..." Something was very wrong here. "I don't think I want to."

"Please, Ev." Pauline sounded on the verge of tears again. "Humor me just one more time. This is the last thing I'll ever ask of you, I promise."

"Pauline, don't talk like that. You're scaring me."

"I don't want you to be scared! Just do what I asked you to, and neither of us will have to be scared anymore!"

"Now I _know_ I don't want to!"

Pauline drew her sword. "Close your eyes and go back to praying," she repeated in a voice as hard and cold as the blade she held level with Ev's throat.

That was it, then. Ev wasn't being paranoid, and she wasn't being overdramatic. Pauline wasn't trying to trick her or frighten her into behaving. This was real.

"Please don't kill me," was all that Ev could think to say. She still didn't understand how any of this had happened, what Sofia and Nenaril had done or why they'd done it. She still didn't know whether Belinda was all right. She hadn't read that book on tropical flora she'd been meaning to get to for weeks. She'd only barely started compiling her grimoire. Had the herb garden in the courtyard been damaged by the explosion? Would it be trampled or burned down in the fighting? Ev loved that garden. It was the only physical thing she'd ever gotten to have a lasting effect on. "I don't want to die yet. Please."

"I'm kind of out of options here, Ev!" Pauline told her. "What else am I supposed to do? Let you crawl off into the wilderness alone to die or lose your soul to demons? Go with you, and spend who knows how long waiting for the moment it will all come down to this anyway? Carry you back to the fortress to be either torn apart by abominations or executed, depending on who's still standing by the time we make it there?" Her hand shook as she spoke, and the blade wavered with it.

"Any of those!" Ev begged. "Please, Pauline, just let me have a chance!"

"You've had chances! When do _I_ get a chance to live my life without spending every waking moment terrified over what's going to become of you? I just want you settled, for better or worse! If it has to be worse in the end, then at least it can be worse and done with!"

 _Yes, let it be done with_ , came a whisper from where the blood welling out of Ev's wounds had fallen upon the stone. _Even if you talk her down this time, you'll only be putting off the inevitable. Why not now? Why not me?_

"Because the last thing I want is to make this easier for her!"

"What?" Pauline asked. "Make what easier for who?"

"Nothing!" Ev said quickly. "I just... I meant..." What had she been about to say before? Had she even thought of anything?

"You were talking about me, weren't you?" Pauline's shining-wet eyes went wide. "So who were you talking _to_?"

"I said no!" Ev tried to explain. She never had been much use at lying. "I told it no, all right? That's what you heard: a refusal! Please, Pauline, it's talking to me because of you. Just put the sword down, please."

"I can't," said Pauline. She kept trembling more and more, until the tiny arcs the blade cut through the air with her movement grew wide enough that one of them nicked Ev's chin. "I really shouldn't. Not if you're... I'm sorry, Ev. You already said that you'd forgive me, didn't you? Even if you take that back, I can't... I have to..."

"You can!" Ev told her. "You don't!"

"Close your eyes and pray," Pauline insisted. "Or... or sing, or just talk calmly to me. Tell me about your book again, or anything else you want to say. Just don't make it worse. I can be quick as long as you don't make it worse. It won't hurt."

The first thing they'd done to her when Pauline had brought her to the Circle had been to cut her and take her blood for a phylactery. Ev had screamed and struggled when the knife had come out, and Pauline had held her hands to keep her still and promised her that it wouldn't hurt that much, but it _had_ hurt that much, and this was going to hurt too, and then she was going to be dead, and she would never get to feel anything else after the cold metal carving into her flesh.

Pauline's sword ceased shaking.

It took Ev a moment to see the frost creeping over Pauline's gauntlets and another moment to spot the source of the spreading ice: a small, pale hand clutching her arm. Pauline looked down at it too, just as another hand reached around from behind her to clamp over her mouth. She gagged loudly, and the arm that hadn't already been frozen solid wheeled about as she heaved.

Much later, Ev would wonder why she did not look away. She would wish she could say that it was courage, or at least a decision with some sort of meaning behind it. She would realize, though, that she only kept watching because she could not comprehend what she was watching. Something buried deep inside of her prevented her from believing that Pauline could really die.

The gagging cut off with an even louder and uglier sound for which Ev knew no words. Pauline's flailing arm fell limp and still. Her gorget bulged around her neck, and blood spilled out from the top of it to cascade down over her breastplate. Then it came apart completely, and Ev could see the red-stained spears of crystal ice protruding from her cousin's throat.

The hands released their hold. Pauline's body fell to the ground, and Nenaril stood in the space where she had just been. Her amber eyes grew wide as she stared at the corpse lying at her feet.

"Good," Nenaril said simply — and then shrieked with laughter until tears streamed down her face.


	14. Everyone Just Left

"I hate you!" Nenaril told Pauline's lifeless form. She kicked it until it rolled over and then stomped on its face. "I hate you! I hate you!"

Ev sunk down against the rock she'd been leaning on and hoped that she hadn't been noticed.

"Nenaril?" Belinda stepped into the light of the glowstone that lay on the ground where Pauline had dropped it. "I'm pretty sure she's dead."

Ev tried and failed to stifle a sob. Still, neither of them looked at her.

"I hate you!" Nenaril continued to trample on Pauline as though Belinda had never spoken to her. "I wish that I could make you feel how much I hate you! But you cannot even feel how your body is being damaged, can you? You are more insensible than I was! Maybe that means I win!"

"Okay, you have fun with that," Belinda said, and moved past her to kneel down over Ev.

"Don't!" Ev blurted out. How could Belinda seem so unconcerned about Nenaril's impossible and terrifying outburst, unless she wasn't really Belinda at all? Pauline had been wrong about her being dead, but she might still have been right about her being possessed.

"Don't what?" Belinda asked. "Unshackle you? Because that's all I'm trying to do." She held up a ring of keys, and Ev realized that Belinda herself had somehow been unchained. Hesitantly, Ev offered her hands, and Belinda opened the manacles binding them together.

"What's the matter with Nenaril?" Ev asked as the weight of the iron fell away from her wrists. "Is she..?"

"An abomination?" Nenaril cut in. "Yes, I am that — to _your_ god! Have you never thought it was terribly cruel of Him to father incomplete children and then punish us for wanting to be whole?"

"Not really, no!" Ev lied, fearing that telling the truth now might mean inviting in demons.

"It _is_ cruel," Nenaril insisted, her voice reverberating like thunder. "It is cruel, and it hurts! I would have lost myself to the pain were it not for Sofia's heresy! She found me as I teetered on the edge between Compassion and Despair. She took me into her soul and taught me how to hurt without being destroyed by it, and now I can do the same for Nenaril. Sofia called me into her office and let Mourning reach out to touch my mind, and I _felt_!" Nenaril stomped down a little too hard, and her foot bounced off of Pauline's breastplate. She stumbled backward, arms reeling in the air.

"Nenaril!" Belinda leapt to her feet and moved to catch her, but Nenaril regained her balance before her friend could reach her side.

"Mourning pulled me up from the abyss," Nenaril continued, swaying on her feet but still standing. "Though I fell back into darkness again after those first experiments, simply having the knowledge that I _could_ change was itself enough to change me." She did not look up at Belinda, who had just called out to her, or at Ev, for whose benefit she was presumably telling this story. She just kept staring at Pauline. "Suddenly, I had a path that I could follow to safety. I no longer had to be content with obeying every order in hopes that I could satisfy my torturers into hurting me less. And now they are all dead or about to die! I killed the worst of them myself! I will never hurt like that again, never!" Her rant finished, she sunk down to her knees and began tearing out clumps of Pauline's hair and tossing them to the wind while screaming curses.

Ev couldn't watch. She needed to get away. She'd had a decent chance to rest, first in Pauline's arms and then on the ground. Though trying to stand made her head spin and her eyes cloud over, she could lift herself up on all fours without her limbs trembling too badly.

"Take it easy," Belinda said as Ev scuttled up the rocks like an animal. "Mourning's a friendly spirit, not a demon. She wants to help."

 _She just murdered someone!_ Ev did not say, because she had to keep moving. _That was my cousin! That was Pauline! That's whose body she's mutilating like it's no different from pulling up grass: the only person who ever did anything to try to help me! And now she's dead!_ She doubted that she would have been able to speak those words aloud even if she weren't so breathless from exertion. It still barely felt real.

"Ev?" Belinda called after her. "You're trailing blood on the dirt! I really don't think that's a good idea!" She huffed in exasperation when Ev did not respond. "Well, don't expect me to chase you! I'm sticking by Nenaril!"

 _Of course you are_ , Ev thought, though she could not begin to identify the feeling entwined with that thought. All she could do — all she had to do — was climb.

—

As she drew near the fortress, Ev recognized Senior Enchanter Lydia standing in the glow of one of the fires just outside the broken wall, and nearly cried with relief. "Lydia!" she called out. "Lydia, it's me, Evelyn! Please help me! I'm hurt badly, and Pauline—!"

Lydia spun around to look at her, and her eyes grew wide with horror. She waved a hand in Ev's direction.

 _Entropy,_ Ev thought when the magic hit. Then her vision blacked over and her head spun and her face hit the ground.

Darkness. Sleep? Why was she drifting off to sleep? She was in danger. She was in pain. Fresh blood flowed from the scrapes on her face, and the blood from her hands and feet and knees still held much of its potency. Ev took hold of its power and pulled herself back to the light.

"Lydia, what are you doing?" she demanded as she lifted her head. "I'm bleeding! I need a little bit more than just rest!"

"I know that, Evelyn," said Lydia. She had turned herself sideways, shifting her position so that both Ev and the gap in the fortress wall were within her field of view. "But I am busy, and I don't know whether you are still yourself. If you are, I promise I will help you as soon as I get the chance. Please be patient. If you struggle, I'll have to assume the worst."

 _Struggle?_ Ev wondered. Was that really the word Lydia had meant to use? Struggle against what?

Lydia cast another spell her way, and a wave of ice washed over her and froze her to the ground.

Ev yelped at the sudden chill. Lydia ignored her. She kept her arms moving, shaping mana, but loosed her next spell in the opposite direction. Ev strained to see what she was doing. In the skirmish amidst the wreckage just ahead, the already gleaming armor of the Templars lit up with the sheen of a magical barrier. They pressed forward against the line of mages trying to force them down the mountain slope and out of the way of the opening the explosion had made. As the mages fell back — and as some among their number simply _fell_ — another round of screaming rose up into the night.

"You're fighting on the side of the Templars?" Ev asked Lydia in disbelief.

"Someone has to," said Lydia. "Someone has to prove to them that this Circle is not entirely irredeemable. What other hope do we have?"

"You're helping them kill us!"

"What do you mean by 'us'?" Lydia asked in alarm. "Are you a part of this madness?"

"I... no! Not intentionally! It all just... happened around me. I meant _us_! Mages, like you and me and Belinda and... all of us."

"There is no 'all of us', Evelyn. If we think that way, if those of us with conscience refuse to hold other mages to account, then we are no better than the worst of our kind." Her fingers strummed at the air, maintaining and manipulating her defensive spell. "Lyrium aside, Templars are ordinary men and women, not monsters or lunatics. Unlike the abominations they hold in check, they can be reasoned with. If we cooperate and keep our heads about us, we can convince them to spare the innocent."

 _"Innocent" of what?_ Ev wondered. Of possession? Of conspiracy? What about the people who didn't know what was happening, but had joined in the fighting to protect their friends? What about the scared kids, not yet broken in to Circle life, who might try to run under the cover of this chaos? Would they be held innocent?

Ev doubted it. Being a mage meant that even the smallest mistake on your part could convince the whole world that you deserved whatever happened to you. Didn't Lydia know that?

Hadn't Lydia known it when she'd told the Templars about Nenaril's mistake?

"You won't convince them to spare me," Ev said. "All this started with that stupid book, and Pauline isn't here to protect me anymore." Lydia did not respond. "You're going to get me killed! Do you care? I suppose there's no reason why you should. How many of your students have you already sacrificed 'for the good of the Circle'? Too many to keep count? What's one more, then?"

"You're beginning to sound like a demon, Evelyn," Lydia cautioned — which was absurd, because Ev knew exactly who she sounded like. She sounded like Belinda.

Maybe she _was_ a demon, though. Hadn't she had that thought before? That she could be a spirit who only believed that she was Ev? How would she know the difference? She didn't feel much like a person, anyhow. She felt like a small, desperate creature curled up at the center of a human body that did not belong to her and that she could not possibly stretch herself enough to fill.

The way the prison of ice numbed her made it worse. Her encased arms and legs no longer felt like a part of her. They felt distant and disconnected, as though they might drop away like dead leaves from the bough of a tree if someone so much as tapped them with a stick.

Her face, though — that felt real enough. The cut that Pauline had left on her chin and the shallower scrapes from falling against the rocks stung in sharp focus. Her awareness collected in them like the blood welling up.

Tentatively, with an almost detached curiosity, Ev shifted her attention to the injuries on her limbs. The pain of them had been dulled by the cold, and the blood that filled them was old and thick and halfway dry, but when she put her mind to it, she could still feel them burning against the ice.

When she put her mind to it a little bit harder, she could feel them literally burning.

 _"So when you first did blood magic, it was just an accident, right?"_ Anders had once asked Merrill, according to her book. _"You cut yourself and realized the power? You didn't deal with a demon?"_ When she'd read that, Ev had wondered whether it could really be possible to use blood magic by mistake. She'd supposed that someone like Anders would know, but that didn't rule out the possibility that Tethras had made up the whole conversation.

Long before that, she had wondered what it was, exactly, that made blood magic a distinct magical discipline. What did using your own blood to power spells have to do with using someone else's to control them? What did either of those have to do with summoning demons? It wasn't the sort of question that she could get away with asking out of pure academic interest, so she'd done her best to put it from her mind.

Now, though, it occurred to her that blood magic might be as broad a category as any other school. Its various techniques might have no more to do with each other than conjuring stone had to do with lighting a fire. If that were the case, then maybe striking a bargain with spirits for the deepest, darkest secrets of the art would be overkill if all one wanted was to dabble. Maybe the basics could be figured out with no supernatural aid whatsoever.

And maybe the basics were simply this: blood was _real_. Pain was real. Ev took that reality and gave it to the lightning, and the ice that held her down shook until it crumbled into vapor.

"Evelyn!" Lydia exclaimed. She turned away from the battle to face Ev fully. "What's gotten into you?"

"Rebellion," Ev answered. "You want to know what hope we have without Templars who will _kindly agree_ not to murder us all in one go? What hope we have without—" Without Pauline. Pauline was dead. Ev shuddered and sobbed out, but then kept speaking. "We have each other! The rebellion _is_ our hope, Lydia! Stop fighting to crush it and let it help us! Can't you see how desperately we need help?"

She refused to let herself question whether she deserved help as well as needed it. That could not matter now.

"You're insane!" Lydia threw out a second blast of cold magic, but Ev pulled her own blood around her like a barrier, and the ice melted against it before it could touch her skin.

"Maybe I am," said Ev. Lightning pulsed through her veins, and blood enveloped her in a cloud of crackling power. Her body was a storm. "But at least I'll never grow up to be like you!"

"Apparently you have no intention of growing up at all!" Lydia's hands moved to shape another attack spell.

With an electric jolt sent through her own muscles, Ev lifted an arm and channeled every drop of lightning within her into one blinding current, all directed at Lydia. The short-lived river of light struck its target dead on, and the percussive force of the thunderclap that struck with it might have knocked Ev to the ground if she were not there already.

The reflective surface of the Senior Enchanter's barrier flashed briefly and then disintegrated. She screamed and fell, and her body remained twitching with flickers of static long after the scream cut off.

Ev failed to notice when her face and outstretched arm collapsed back against the hard, stone ground. She supposed that she must have blacked out for a second — or for longer than a second, maybe, though probably not for too much longer. It was still night when she shifted her head onto its side to look. The fires still burned, and the sounds of battle still rang out from the fortress.

"'What hope do we have? We have each other, Lydia!'" Pauline said with a sardonic roll of her eyes as she sat down next to Ev. She wore breeches and a simple jerkin, like she did when she was off duty but not headed anywhere fancy. "And then you murdered her."

"You know what I meant," Ev muttered. Her voice rasped almost to the point of inaudibility, but that didn't matter now. "You must know, since you're in my head."

"Mage solidarity?" the demon asked. "It's still a lousy start for that, isn't it? Especially after everything with Nenaril and Belinda. Look what trying to help _them_ got you." It reached out to stoke Ev's cheek, and Ev could almost feel the warmth of skin instead of the empty chill where the Veil just barely prevented them from touching. "Maybe it's time to consider that everyone else in the world might be right, even if that means accepting you've been wrong. Maybe all mages are as rotten inside as you've always known that you are. If you try to rely on one other, you'll just end up tearing each other apart, because you're horrible people."

"Go away," Ev said.

"You don't want me to," it answered with confidence. "That's the saddest part: you're that damned lonely. You have always been that lonely. Lonely enough that you never wanted her to die. Lonely enough to love her even after she hurt you, even after she warped everything that you are beyond hope of repair. So why be afraid of me? Why not let me in? What could I possibly do to you that you haven't already learned to accept from her?"

"Go away," Ev repeated. Giving in was not an option. It had never been an option. The reason didn't matter.

"No, I'm staying right here," the demon said. "I can keep quiet, if you won't listen to reason, but why would I leave now? You could change your mind, or someone else could come along to change it for you. Or, if no one does find you, you'll die here. An empty body wouldn't be so bad a consolation prize, especially if it's fresh."

Ev wanted to cry, but there were no tears left.

"Murderer," the demon said. There was something almost like affection in its voice. "Maleficar. Dangerous, accursed thing. You deserve whatever happens to you. So just let me happen to you."

"Leave her be!" Nenaril's voice struck like a wave, fluid yet forceful. She stood over Ev and the demon, staring down at them with eyes like pools of swirling, silver light. How long had she been there? Ev hadn't noticed her approach. "I know that it hurts, and I am sorry that I have no balm to offer for your pain, but taking Ev's life from her will not heal you."

The demon glared up at her and scowled. "Easy for you to say!"

"It is not," said Nenaril. "Few things are easy for me now." The two spirits gazed into each other, and something beyond Ev's comprehension seemed to pass between them.

The demon in the guise of Pauline jerked backward, pulling its hand away from Ev's face. Its brow knit in an almost pitiable expression. "No, I don't suppose I'll win this one after all," it said with a sigh. Then it vanished.

The light in Nenaril's eyes shrunk and dimmed until all that remained was the earthly fire reflected in her pupils. Belinda stood beside her, holding her hand.

"Can you sit up on your own?" Nenaril asked.

"No," Ev managed to say.

"Will you accept help with that, if it means someone touching you? The reason is that I would like to give you water."

"Okay," said Ev. Maybe she shouldn't agree to anything proposed by someone possessed, but she was beyond caring about that. If no one helped her, it would only be a matter of time before she broke. There was at least a small chance that Mourning really did mean her no ill. The next person to find her might not offer even that much hope.

"Will you help me with this, Belinda?" Nenaril asked.

"Of course," said Belinda. She released Nenaril's hand to kneel down, then gently rolled Ev onto her back and propped up her head in Belinda's lap.

"I thought you weren't going to follow me," Ev croaked out, wincing at the strain in her own voice beyond the first few syllables.

"I didn't," said Belinda. "Nenaril followed you. I followed Nenaril."

Nenaril joined them on the ground. She cupped her hands together, and they glowed with cold magic as they filled up with water pulled from the air. Then she pressed her entwined fingers to Ev's parted lips and let the water drain through them. It tasted faintly of copper and silt, but was chilled enough that the taste barely mattered. Ev drank a little too eagerly at first, but Nenaril was careful and attentive and pulled back almost the moment that Ev began to choke. After just a few coughs, Ev felt well enough to ask for more water, and Nenaril obliged her and did not stop again until Ev turned her head away to indicate that she was finished drinking.

"Would you like me to clean your wounds?" Nenaril asked. "I cannot heal them, unfortunately. I discovered that with Belinda's bruises. Things might go more smoothly when you do get a healer if they are already cleaned out, though."

"Why are you being so kind to me?" Ev asked. Her voice still sounded hideous, but it no longer hurt to speak.

"Because I am too exhausted to join back in the fighting, but too anxious to stand around doing nothing," Nenaril said.

"Oh." That answer struck Ev as strange, though she could not quite place what was so unusual about it. Still, it made a sort of sense. "I don't deserve it, though. I used blood magic."

Nenaril smiled. "And I am possessed!"

"No, you don't understand. I..." She had to make herself say it. She deserved whatever saying it would get her. "I used blood magic to kill someone. Lydia. Senior Enchanter Lydia. She's... Her body is right over there. I did that."

"Really?" Nenaril giggled. "Why?"

"Knowing you, she must have _really_ earned it," Belinda chimed in.

"Uh," said Ev. She felt a sudden urgent need to get far away from both of them, but had no way to do so.

"Sorry," said Nenaril. "Sincerest apologies. It is just that... she hurt me. I hate her, and I wanted to kill her, but I knew that was not a good enough reason on its own. That is why I want to understand your reason. I need it to know what I feel about her being dead."

"I don't know!" said Ev. "I mean, I remember what happened, and I sort of remember what I was thinking, but none of that feels like a reason. It feels like I just... did it. Because I could. And because she did sort of attack me first, and I... reacted... but that was just because she thought I was possessed, because I was covered in blood and yelling at her to stop defending the Templars. It made me so angry that she would do that when.. when she could have been defending _us_ instead!"

"I am sorry," said Nenaril. "That sounds horrible and frightening. Thank you for fighting back."

"Why would you thank me for that?"

"I am not sure! But I am glad that you did. It is strange and pleasant to feel glad about something. So, thank you again. And, again: shall I wash out your cuts?"

Ev hesitated. Her heart still beat with uncomfortable speed when she thought too hard about who she was allowing to touch her — an abomination, a murderer, her own cousin's killer — but Belinda's lap made a nicer pillow than the stone ground, and Nenaril's hands were gentle and kind, and she already felt so much better after getting some water in her. Besides, who was she to judge? "Yes. Please. And thank _you_. I would like that."

The water that Nenaril conjured for rinsing was mercifully, numbingly cold. For plucking out debris and clipping away dead skin, she formed a pair of delicate pincers out of ice so that she would not have to poke around in Ev's wounds with her bare fingers. Still, it was somewhat less than perfectly painless, and Ev decided she could use a distraction. "May I ask you some questions?"

"You may ask," said Nenaril. "I do not promise to answer all of them."

"So, if I have this right... Sofia _was_ possessed, but now she isn't, because she sent the spirit to you instead?"

"Correct!"

"And she could do that? Just... stop being possessed? And you could too, if you wanted to?"

"I could if I wanted to, yes. However, I do _not_ want to, and therefore I cannot."

"Why don't you want to?"

"Many reasons. First, this is not the cure discovered at the White Spire. That process involved possession, but possession itself was never the key. Because Mourning came to me through Sofia and not directly from the Fade, I can only be myself while she is within me. Even if after sending her away I were to follow the procedure that Pharamond did — which would be difficult and risky — it would not restore my magic. The ice is from Mourning. She helps me defend myself. And I help her, too — that is another reason. I am not just doing this for me. She is my friend."

"I like her!" Belinda declared out of nowhere. "I like anyone who treats you as well as you deserve! You're absolutely right: there'd be no point in making her go away!"

"Thank you, lethallan."

Ev felt a twinge in her chest of something colder than the ice against her hand. "I... have another question. An unrelated one. Are there other Tranquil mages who've been... kept hidden, like you were?"

"I do not know." Nenaril shuddered, and Ev winced as the pincers prodded a little a too deeply. "I did not keep careful track of the others' schedules. It did not seem important, at the time. Is there someone you are looking for?"

Ev's mouth felt as dry as though she had not just gulped down buckets worth of cold water. "Viola?" she asked.

"I am unaware of any Tranquil mages with that name. But perhaps we could find out if she... Oh." She shuddered again. "Wait. Dark red hair? And... about my age, I suppose?"

"Yes!" Ev all but shouted, her voice returning in a rush.

"I am sorry," said Nenaril. "I... we, the Tranquil... they make us... clean the Harrowing chamber, sometimes. They are not careful about what we see. I am so sorry. She is dead."

"Oh," said Ev. She'd already known that, hadn't she? Why did hearing it confirmed feel like something breaking?

"Forgive me, please!" Nenaril went on. "I felt nothing! I saw what remained, and I felt nothing! So many times... So many young mages... We were _all_ so young!" She gave up on her task entirely and crawled around to Belinda's side to collapse sobbing against her shoulder. "I am sorry, Ev! I was supposed to be helping you! I am sorry!"

"Hey," said Belinda, wrapping an arm around her and pulling her close. "You didn't do anything wrong, okay? I'm here. I've got you."

"Don't," said Ev. "Don't ever apologize to me. _I'm_ sorry. I hurt you, and I just keep hurting you and..." And now Ev was crying again. What was wrong with her? "It isn't even about me. I don't have any right to... to act like it's about me. Viola wasn't... it's not like we were..."

"Ev, knock it off!" said Belinda. "I know what I said back then, but... I'm sorry, okay? You didn't deserve that. And it's not like she'd be offended that someone liked her enough to grieve for her. You'd have to be stupid to feel that way." Then she started crying too, which meant that they were all crying together.

Ev found herself thinking that if someone were to look at them now without knowing who or what they were, and if that someone could not make out their robes through the darkness and the dirt, then all that someone would see would be three young women suffering horribly. It would look like a tragedy. It would look something bad had happened.

Ev did not notice that the sounds of battle had ceased until another bird-shaped firework, this time formed of blue flame instead of red, flew up shrieking into the sky above the fortress. "Does that mean it's over?" she asked.

"Yes," said Nenaril, beginning to laugh through her tears. "It means that we won. Ostwick Circle has fallen."

"And we're alive," said Belinda. She laughed too. "Feels strange. I've been dead for most of my life."

"I am so glad you're alive!" Nenaril hugged Belinda with enough enthusiasm that Ev could feel her being jostled by it. "I am so glad that I get to see you again! My friend, my only friend in this accursed place, when everyone else either was too afraid to approach me or looked at me like some exotic bauble!"

"Sorry," said Ev. "I'm really sorry."

"I'm not that special," Belinda protested. "I just... Mother told me to respect the Dalish, and I barely remember her, but I somehow remembered that, and I still can't believe that you actually somehow _liked_ me when I'm not even... when I'm only..."

Nenaril did not respond to either of them immediately, but buried her face in the curve of Belinda's neck. Belinda cut off her rambling with a surprised squeak.

"It was all meant to happen next week, you know." Nenaril said. "The plan was that I would be cured and then serve as the distraction myself. When they dragged you downstairs and hurt you, I begged Sofia to find a way to make it start tonight instead. How could I survive waking up to a world from which you had just been taken? It would have been too cruel."

"Oh," Belinda said.

"Sorry," Ev said again. On top of everything else, she had smuggled in the book that had gotten them all in danger.

"You do not need to be," Nenaril told her.

"But I am! It's my fault. I hurt you."

"And I hurt you. We were children, and we made mistakes. I do want to forgive you. Just promise me one thing."

"Anything!"

"Do not make any more excuses for Ser Trevelyan."

"I promise," Ev said. "There's no excuse for what she did to you."

"Not just for what she did to me," said Nenaril.

"What do you..? Oh! No, of course not! I'm sorry. I'm sure there's a lot of other things she never talked about to me, I didn't mean to suggest—"

Belinda threw her head back and groaned. "Ev, she tried to kill you!"

"She would never have actually done it!" Ev blurted out before she realized what she was saying.

"And there we go!" Belinda shoved Ev out of her lap in retaliation.

"Well, she wouldn't have!" Ev insisted once she'd recovered from the shock of her skull hitting the stone. "I know that doesn't make her a good person, but what right do I have to... She saved me, all right? Probably many times, but definitely at the Harrowing. I was out so late because they usually kill you for taking too long, and _I_ took too long, but she made them let me finish anyway!"

"Oh, I see!" Belinda snarled. "So that gave her the right to go back on it at any time! Is that what you're saying?"

"She wouldn't have gone back on it! She didn't want to! She couldn't even hold the sword steady!" Ev felt fresh tears beginning to well up from her eyes. Pauline had been anxious and upset and at her very lowest when she'd died. She would never get to be anything else.

"You're hopeless!" Belinda told her.

"Stop," Nenaril said. Her voice trembled, as did the hand she laid on Belinda's shoulder.

Everything went silent and still.

"You're not hopeless," Belinda corrected herself finally, her voice drained of its venom. "But... okay, maybe she wouldn't have done it. Maybe she would have, but I'll never be able to prove that, right? Still... isn't it bad enough she brought herself that close? Do you think you aren't allowed to be angry until you're dead?"

Ev choked down the automatic denial and forced herself to consider it honestly. "You might be right," she admitted eventually. "I don't know. There's a lot of things I don't know. Everything is happening all at once, and she... she's dead. And I'm still alive." That had never been how anything was supposed to go.

"Thank you," said Nenaril. "That can be enough for now. Thank you, Ev."

The sun had begun to rise, Ev noticed. When she looked toward the fortress, the new light allowed her to see mages bringing things out from the main building and making piles in the courtyard, seemingly organizing supplies for a long journey. The garden looked in poor shape even from a distance, but maybe she could at least salvage a cutting or two, once she was back on her feet and able to help.

"So what happens next?" she asked Nenaril. "I mean, healing and organizing, obviously, but do you know Sofia's plans for after that? Are we heading south to join up with Fiona's people?"

"That is where Sofia intends to lead anyone who will follow her, yes," said Nenaril. "However, Fiona's group is a large and varied one. It is unlikely that I would be welcome there."

"You know," said Belinda, "on account of being possessed." She did not sound concerned about any of this, which Ev assumed meant that she and Nenaril had already discussed it.

"There is a smaller group, though,” Nenaril continued. "A sort of vanguard of the rebellion. While Fiona's rebels focus on amassing forces and defending the most vulnerable of the mages freed from the Circles, others remain on the move. Sofia has been in contact with them for a while now. I understand that they helped her a great deal, and that they are currently within the fortress after joining in our battle."

"We'll be going with them," said Belinda with a proud grin. "Because they already have one possessed mage! And because I'm not letting Nenaril disappear on me again. I never stopped missing her after eight years, and I don't ever want to find out how long it would take to stop. Not if I can help it." Nenaril smiled gratefully at her.

"I'll miss you," Ev told Belinda.

"What?" Belinda blinked. "Really?"

"Yeah," said Ev, because she would. A part of her wanted to boldly declare she would join the vanguard with them, but she doubted she really had that in her. The road ahead would be difficult enough as it was. "Surprises me, too."

"That's the first time anyone has said they would miss me in almost fifteen years. Weird that I've been keeping count, right?"

"Not too weird," Ev assured her.

Belinda leaned down and pressed a kiss to her forehead. "I'll miss you too."


	15. An Epilogue That Is Also a Prologue

"Well hello, Ev! Fancy meeting you here!"

Ev turned to find a man she did not recognize staring at her. He was not currently wearing armor, but that didn't necessarily mean he wasn't a Templar. Those muscles certainly didn't look as though they belonged on a mage or a cleric, and there were only so many kinds of people attending the Haven Conclave.

 _You can see me?_ she restrained herself from asking. The stealth charm Sofia had given to Ev when she'd sent her from Redcliffe to carry out this mission was supposed to deflect people's attention from her, unless she chose to draw their notice or they were particularly determined to keep looking in the direction where she happened to be standing. She hoped that she had just gotten unlucky, and that it wasn't malfunctioning. "Do I know you?" she asked instead.

"Why, Ev! I am deeply, deeply wounded by your callous words!" The man flashed her a sardonic grin. "You really don't remember your own brother?"

"Oh, right: Jeffrey." It had been well over a year since Ev had seen him on her trip to her parents' house after the Harrowing, and she'd had many more important things to think about since then. "What are you doing here? Worried that the conclave will grant mages the right to inherit property?"

"No, I can't say that seems like an imminent threat." Which was an understatement if Ev had ever heard one — and she had definitely heard far more than one, even just since arriving at Haven. "It was Mother and Father who sent me, actually. They want you to come home. They're more than willing to shelter you until all this chaos has run its course."

"I have other plans," Ev told him without pausing to consider it. She had been finished with all of her considering for a while now.

"Oh no, all of my best efforts were for naught," Jeffrey deadpanned. "Mother and Father will be so terribly disappointed in me." Then he shrugged. "Still, let me know if you change your mind. I'll be around, so try not to get me killed like you did to Cousin Pauline."

"Pauline spent my whole childhood trying to break my will to fight, then made me fight a demon to prove I deserved to live to adulthood," Ev told him. "That's how the Circle works. That's what even the 'good' Templars do. She deserved to die."

Ev did not say, _I'm glad she's dead_ , because that would have been a little too close to a lie, and talking to people she didn't like was uncomfortable enough without weighing herself down under a heap of unnecessary lies. She just smiled at how audaciously she'd told the truth and let Jeffrey draw his own conclusions.

"Ah." Jeffrey's smirk stretched thin. "So you've become the arbiter of life and death?"

"Maybe I have. It's a family tradition, isn't it?"

"Well, good luck with that. I have little patience for family traditions." He turned and began to walk away.

"But not as little patience as Leona had!" Ev called after him. "Unless she's gone home?"

"She hasn't," Jeffrey confirmed without looking back.

Ev sighed with relief. Maybe at least one of them had gotten all the way free.

Or was it two of them, now? Ev was trying, anyway.

There were other people in the temple's back halls, and some now glanced at Ev as they passed her. Maybe Jeffrey had seen through the charm because of his intent to find her, specifically, and by talking to him she had weakened it enough for others to see through it too. If that were the case, then everything should be fine if she could just lose their attention again.

The Temple of Sacred Ashes was full of small, out-of-the-way shrines set up beneath icons of Andraste's disciples. Ev kneeled down before a nearby altar at the feet of a statue of Brona and clasped her hands together. If anyone wanted to know why she had wandered back here, let them think she'd been searching out a quiet place to pray.

Ev had no intention of actually praying, but the words sprung into her head against her will. _My Maker, know my heart: Take from me a life of sorrow..._ She did not want to be thinking that. If she kept thinking it, she might scream, and that would defeat her purpose entirely. No matter how hard she tried, though, she could not empty her mind and hold wordlessly still.

Maybe she could find her own words to replace the ones that hurt her.

_Aunt Lillian? Are you there? I know that dwarves pray to their ancestors, and I've been wondering if Leona does too now. I don't suppose you've heard from her?_

It felt a little silly, but that was fine. Ev had prayed to the Maker many times without fully believing in Him, so why should not believing that Lillian could hear her stop her now?

_It's strange, but when I try to picture you, I think of you as you would have been if everything were all right and I'd gotten to know you like any other member of my family. Maybe that's just because I'm looking at the statue of an adult woman while praying to you, or maybe it's because it hurts too much to think of the little girl you really were. I'm sorry if it's callous of me to turn away from that reality._

_You must have been terrified. How could your own parents do that to you? To a child who loved them and trusted them to love her back? I wonder if you felt angry and betrayed, or if you didn't even have time for that. I doubt I would have had time for that. I was so confused, and it hurt so much that I could barely think at all._

Ev realized when the details of the marble blurred that she had started crying. Well, there was nothing suspicious about that. People could have all sorts of reasons for crying while they prayed. She let the tears fall.

_You know, I think the dwarves might have the right idea. If we won't hear anything back either way, and we have to take it on faith that anyone hears us, then why should we waste our words on a god a who left us by choice? The only reason you weren't there for me when I needed you is because our family murdered you._

_I really did need you. Mother, Father, Pauline... all of them wanted to help me, but none of them knew how. I wouldn't hold that against them, except that they never would have listened to anyone who did know._

_Of course, even if you hadn't died, you would have been locked away and never let out until you'd proven to the Templars that you would only say what they wanted to hear from you. They wouldn't have allowed you anywhere near me unless you made yourself as unhelpful as Lydia was._

_That's why I have to stop this conclave, no matter the cost. Any compromise it could possibly come to would mean a world where the Templar Order is re-legitimized. It would mean a world where everyone goes on pretending that the people who know what's best for mages are the people trained to kill us._

_I could ask you to intervene somehow, to help me ensure that's not the world we're headed for. That's usually what people do when they pray, isn't it? But I know that you can't really help me, not the way that things turned out for us. I wish that weren't true. I wish I could have met you. As it is, all the help you can give me is another awful story, another reason to remember that I have to see this through. I promise I'll do my best to make that count._

Ev wiped away her tears with the cuff of her robe and stood. She looked around warily as she continued down the hall, but no one looked back at her.

Some supernatural guidance would have been nice, if it really were available to her. She knew that she needed to sabotage the conclave, but had very little idea of how to go about that. Assassinating Divine Justinia or some other high-ranking cleric would certainly throw everything back into chaos, but that might be too obvious of a solution. Others had tried before — with widely varying success — so the Chantry's representatives would surely be on their guard. Ev had to know whether it was even possible before she made the attempt, because failure would mean throwing her life away for nothing, and she had to believe she deserved better than that. She was doing this because all mages deserved better than that.

A woman's voice cried out from behind a closed pair of double doors and interrupted Ev's thoughts: "Someone help me, please!"

Ev's legs locked up. She looked around her again, this time to see whether anyone else was reacting, but the few people within her view continued on as though they hadn't heard a thing.

To be perfectly fair, maybe they really hadn't. Ev was nearer to the doors than any of them, and what she'd heard had only barely been loud enough to be called a scream. It had sounded like a call for help from someone holding out very little hope that anyone would respond.

That was Ev's final coherent thought before she stopped thinking and simply reacted.

"What's going on here?" she demanded as she threw open the doors.

Everyone in the chamber turned to stare at her. There were no Templars among them, and the only mages were decked out in a strange armor that Ev had never seen before. They had surrounded and restrained a cleric, who Ev guessed was probably the woman who'd screamed. Ev wondered whether this was some other rebel group trying to accomplish the same thing she was, and considered that maybe she shouldn't have interrupted them, but then she saw the demon.

At least, she could only assume that was a demon.

The cleric took advantage of the distraction to knock some strange, glowing orb out of the creature's hand, and everyone stopped staring at Ev to watch the magical artifact fly through the air and land at her feet.

Was that the important thing here, then? Well, Ev had asked a question that no one seemed to be in any hurry to answer, and she had a lot more where it came from. She wasn't about to just let them all dodge it forever, if there was anything she could do about that.

Ev picked up the orb.


End file.
